New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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 underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete 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 Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned 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