New Year, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility