New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?
The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. 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 distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance