Fresh Start, Old Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce 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 confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis 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 ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance