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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look 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'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into 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 fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration 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 wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility