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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance