New Year, Familiar Warnings: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. 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 surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility