New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority 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, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, 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 obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility