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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics 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 serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. 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 resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance