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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material 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 in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility