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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic 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 obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident 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 advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility