Fresh Start, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary 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 are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people 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 journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves 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 appears hopeful about the possibility