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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, 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 mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain 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 seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow 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. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility