Fresh Start, Old Warnings: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, 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 gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS 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 some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking 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 rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: 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, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding 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-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance