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

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, 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 film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch 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 adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted 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 depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. 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 resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility