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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance