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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *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 act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance