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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *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 inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: 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 in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility