New Year, Familiar Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?
The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
Metropolis
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. 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 preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility
