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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from 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 aspiration for humanity. 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 far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first 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 various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels 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 nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance