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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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 closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance