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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least 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 global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; 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 relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility