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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations 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 why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst 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 these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set 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, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility