Fresh Start, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, 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 discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from 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. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes 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 original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility