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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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 whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance