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

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility