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The year 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 futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists 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 romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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 nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant 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 most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance