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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest 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 this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves 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 appears optimistic about the chance