New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. 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 mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal 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 new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened 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 more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance