Fresh Start, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original 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. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, 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*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest 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 each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves 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 appears hopeful about the possibility