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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *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* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance