New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?
The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. 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 a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons 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 recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films 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 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 seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to 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 instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
