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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. 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 activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility