New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Set in 2026 Show Us?
The date 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 science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?
The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, 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 discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set 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 our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap 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 advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility