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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world'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 contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most 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 propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent 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 rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment 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 falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap 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