Fresh Start, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone 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. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines 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 becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; 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 optimistic about the chance