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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look 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 isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 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 become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative 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 prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located 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 chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance