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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's 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 take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons 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 woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant 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 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 great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance