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The date 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 science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content 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*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, 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 specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility