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

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return 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 spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility