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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes 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 acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, 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 poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility