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

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities 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 propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, 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 more radical 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 an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility