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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete 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 Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility