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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style 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 function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films 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. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with 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 marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility