New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see 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 hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be 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 credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly 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 poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
