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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal 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 film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether 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 rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening 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 – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete 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 remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance