New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis 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 far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts 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 simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility