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The year 2025 could appear 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 science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover 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 instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: 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 in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility