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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic 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 optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists 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 romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility