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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside 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, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, 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 allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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 underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility