New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned 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 impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow 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 virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance