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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 a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm 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 promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility