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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines 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 falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance