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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers 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 – regarding plot 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 find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set 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 pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material 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 these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of 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 don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance