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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, 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 humanity discovers a gateway 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 concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be 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 modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility