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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain 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 savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, 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 stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi 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 optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set 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 timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when 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 further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed 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 reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, 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 easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm 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 peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance