New Year, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Show Us?
The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: 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 facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the classic five-film *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* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake 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 already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic 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, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
Metropolis
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility
