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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer 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 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 ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of 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 wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance