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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. 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 teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow 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 around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility