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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary 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 establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *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 closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility