Fresh Start, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe 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 futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached 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 in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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 nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility