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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *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 people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations 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 useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already 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 technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine 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 have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility