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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated 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. 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 long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway 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 immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch 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 adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung 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. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility