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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking 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 rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content 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*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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 stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, 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 well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing 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 have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance