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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes 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.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original 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* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility