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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 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 long-term aspiration 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 spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest 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 these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original 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* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance