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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow 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 approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility