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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis 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 FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if 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 determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: 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 facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction 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 lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance