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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic 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 beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists 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 adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting 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 apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out 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 love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance