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

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to 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 long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain 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 detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling 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 impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil 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 falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine 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 reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility