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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming 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 an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance