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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's 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. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

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 hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter 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 true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, 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 set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning 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 feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that 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. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist 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 entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance