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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 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 let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring 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 witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance