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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 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 science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance