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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least 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 various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify 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 feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering 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, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility