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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set 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 seem quite detached 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 debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, 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 are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility