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

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, 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 elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility