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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted 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 are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case 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 realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin 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 likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *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. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; 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, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return 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 bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance