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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now 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 virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily 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 futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot 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 inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility