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

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly 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 dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited 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 ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *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 symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest 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 in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility