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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance