New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal 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 new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, 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* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance