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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *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 act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of 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 adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: 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 in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility