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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone 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 are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter'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 far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set 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 chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling 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 clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, 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 most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance