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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance