Fresh Start, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis 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 society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in 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, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
