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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding 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 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; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain 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 claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set 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, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility