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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: 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 annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started 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 run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, 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 quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute 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 celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance