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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

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 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 narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality 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 old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility