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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction 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 hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *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 closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility