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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations 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 some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion 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 future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union 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 expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance