New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone 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 people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst 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*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *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 master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created 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 the modern world in a future that otherwise seems 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 union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
