Fresh Start, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?
The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located 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, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence 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 around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset 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 four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. 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 underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance
