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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, 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 allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various 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 perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's 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 quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when 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 further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument 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 in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility