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

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like 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 take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, 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 allow Mars become a long-term 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 optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming 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 elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility