New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi 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 hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites 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 far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, 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 most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance