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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us 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

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot 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 one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm 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