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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter'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 distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: 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 in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord 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 perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility