New Year, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility