New Year, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see 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 recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, 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, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility