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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning 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 find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored 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 farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most 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 nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance