Fresh Start, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest 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 facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance