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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see 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 two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance