New Year, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some 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 with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

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 mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: 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 in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; 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