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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now 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 determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch 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 seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But 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*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

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 started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work 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 most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility