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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic 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 chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance