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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites 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 quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung 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 chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility