New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from 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 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 far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, 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.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance