New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set 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 game-to-film translation *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 inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance