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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion 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 future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set 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; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, 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, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with 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 close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance