New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 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 bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility
