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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place 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 feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time 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 further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool 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 otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility