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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set 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 timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling 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 half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts 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. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, 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 advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance