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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify 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 quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance