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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *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 ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. 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 global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly 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 chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility