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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance