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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history 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 two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set 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 pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance