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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, 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 another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance