Fresh Start, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?
The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. 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 long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope 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 spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch 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*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie 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 half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema 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 towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm 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 advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility
