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

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility