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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But 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 facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn 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 wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems 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 celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves 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; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility