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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set 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 take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

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 gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted 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 rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance