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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt 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 growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance