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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter'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 doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat 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 ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance