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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment 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 adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility