New Year, Familiar Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?
The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted 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 research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow 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. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
Metropolis
Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion 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 coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility