New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.
Doom
Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *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 symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent 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 subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility
