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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems 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, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean 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 whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality 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 manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility