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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films 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 Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential 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

Most 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 nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, 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 has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known 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 rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm 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 peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance