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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 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 negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify 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 seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting 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 accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 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 only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility