Fresh Start, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

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 mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: 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 whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity 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 envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance