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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with 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 aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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 underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears 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 now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion 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 two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance