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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting 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 the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty 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*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance