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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. 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 act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be 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 new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility