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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. 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 one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility