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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter 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 true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel 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 farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise 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 spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance