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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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 distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, 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 also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire 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 wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots 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 hopeful about the chance