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 consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.
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 humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility
