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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, 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 gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion 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, distinct from 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 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 act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility