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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 one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard 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, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, 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 why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion 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 more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; 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