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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted 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 recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance