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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series 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 the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance