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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning 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 specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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 annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves 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 created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility