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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

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* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility