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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

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 humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection 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 useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual 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 started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin 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 clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not 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 the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility