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

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance