New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *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 closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility