New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However 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 this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. 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 underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility