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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, 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 among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, 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*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been 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 unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned 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 argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; 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 hopeful about the chance