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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various 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 throughout cinematic history 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 mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps 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 builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance