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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance