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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover 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 dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (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 why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *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 serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence 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 virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance