New Year, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

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 people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place 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 feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility