New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?
The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.
The Game '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 mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter'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 distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content 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*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung 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 timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
