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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish 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 find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending 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 coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance