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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people 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 transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance