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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material 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 facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument 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 advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” 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 version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility