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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility