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

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance