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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy 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 hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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 annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; 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, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines 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 exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance