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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert 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 super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place 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 seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance