New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored 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 debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, 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* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally 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 more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility