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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: 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 in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance