New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?
The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.
Doom
Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with 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 humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
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 started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
