New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to 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 difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility