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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world'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 have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute 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 nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine 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 reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility