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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain 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 humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning 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 feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility