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

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's 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 impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment 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 far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance