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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 one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis 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 far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. 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; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance