Fresh Start, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *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 inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it 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 rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series 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* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film 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 lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine 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. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance