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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate 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 future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance