New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy 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 rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, 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 present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original 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 closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged 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 appears hopeful about the chance