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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content 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*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material 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*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *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* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping 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 elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility