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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes 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 the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap 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 pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance