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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look 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'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance