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

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment 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 adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: 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 in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

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 tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

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* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility