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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, 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 discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient 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 instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, 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 distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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 annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility