MUSIC
Bubblegum pop, along with trap, hip-hop and rap, remained the predominant genre of music consumed by casual music listeners throughout the mid-2020s. As with previous decades, there remained a sizable audience for EDM and rock in all their subgenres, although in the long run it would be some decades before either would truly overthrow the particular brand of big-name pop which had held the throne since the turn of the millennium.
Notable Artists
DJ Leenman, born Lamont Nibbs, was a second generation Jamaican immigrant who first came onto the Miami hip-hop scene following the post-COVID era of 2022. After signing a deal with Epic Records in early 2024, he quickly grew to be one of the most popular artists of the mid-2020s, with his concerts routinely gathering tens of thousands at the height of his popularity in 2026-7.
MOVIES AND TELEVISION
One of the 20th century's most important cultural cornerstones, the movie theater, had fallen into a steep decline starting in the mid-2020s due in most part to the emergence of online video on-demand streaming platforms. Although steaming services such as Netflix and Hulu were in mainstream use since the beginning of the 2010s, it was not until the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic that streaming really began to take off within most developed countries. On the other hand, the popularity of streaming services was stymied by the flood of separate services created by numerous companies attempting to get their fingers in the pie - the so-called "Streaming Wars" of the 2020s and early-to-mid 30s.
Despite this, it would be quite naive to say that the movie theater was at death's door for 2027. Indeed, many would continue to buy tickets for theater screenings well into the 21st century, and even then it would persist as an obsolete curiosity until the Cascading Complexity Collapse of 2534-6.
Death of One Franchise...
By 2023, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was failing in popularity. After the release of
Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the production executives at Disney and Marvel Studios wanted to continue the multi-billion dollar franchise despite the lack of overarching plot planned for future movies. This, combined with a tight production schedule and a slight shift towards series released on Disney+, contributed to a slow decline in both the box office and streaming ratings. The final nail in the coffin, however, would not occur until the release of
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in theaters on May 1, 2026.
With a budget of over $275 million minus marketing,
The Kang Dynasty ended up grossing $458 million worldwide, a far cry from the MCU's billion-plus heyday of
Infinity War and
Endgame. Many cultural historians, such as the Martian tweak Mariana Morehouse
[1] and the superturing GossamaiBizzaro
[2] point to the months following the movie's release as the time when Disney executives most likely realized that they could not continue with big-budget movies and made a change of plans. Following the mediocre release of
Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027, the Marvel Cinematic Universe pivoted even more towards streaming series, abandoning the "Cinematic" portion of the franchise altogether by the end of the year.
...Birth of Another
But in the same year that
Guardians Vol. 3 and
The Marvels were released, the seeds of a new film franchise - and ultimately, a resurgence in an entire genre of cinema - were being planted. The video game behemoth Nintendo, in an attempt to make up for the disaster that was
Super Mario Bros. (1993), announced in 2018 that they had partnered with Illumination Entertainment (known for
Sing and the
Despicable Me franchise, and who until 2022 carried an infamous reputation among critics) in the production of
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), which would go on to be the second-highest grossing movie of its release year.
Following the film's huge success, Illumination and Nintendo went to work on a sequel. Initially titled
The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2, it was renamed during post-production to
The Super Mario World Movie in order to reflect the game it took its setting and characters from, the landmark title
Super Mario World (1991). It was during the sequel's production that the true genesis for the Nintendo Cinematic Universe began.
Ultimately, given the current timeframe there is not much to say about the mere two NCU movies that were released in the mid-2020s - but rest assured, there will be more than enough to cover going forward.
Television
While not quite yet at its death throes among mainstream audiences worldwide, traditional cable television was beginning a long slide to irrelevancy. Cultural historians point to the emergence of the internet and the homogenization of many networks towards reality TV as the two primary causes that lead to cable's downfall. This decline was pronounced among Millennials and Generation Z, who, having been raised during the dawn of the Internet were far more eager to "cut the cord" than their parents or grandparents could ever have been.
Despite this (or perhaps because of it), there remained a significant push by many cable networks to rebrand in order to attract higher ratings. Children's programming such as Nickelodeon were at the forefront of this attempt at resurgence, along with former cultural touchstones such as MTV and HBO. For the most part, however, most networks were more inclined to sideline their cable components in favor of their on-demand streaming services, all but ensuring the demise of traditional TV.
VIDEO GAMES
With the release of every new cutting-edge game from the 1990s to the 2020s, contemporary critics hailed each of them as an example of true realism in gaming - and within half a decade, they would be proven wrong by the next release.
By the northern summer of 2027, however, the prevailing consensus was that video games, or at the very least non-VR games released for high-end PCs, could produce graphics that were nigh-indistinguishable from reality. Computing costs at the time barred those with less money to spend from enjoying these games in their full glory, and this would continue for several decades.
First Person Shooters
Well into the 2020s, the FPS remained the genre of choice for hardcore and professional gamers. Multiplayer cornerstones such as
Fortnite and
Team Fortress 2 continued on as popular pastimes for millions over the course of the decade, albeit accompanied by numerous games with transient popularity such as
Zombies in Vietnam (2026) and the numerous
Call of Duty titles.
In April 2025, the long-awaited
Confirmed Kill was released on Steam. A photorealistic FPS that often fooled many into thinking it was real, the game has been touted by many both then and now as the first truly "realistic" video game. The success of
Confirmed Kill lead to the hasty development of id Software's team-based shooter
Lead, which due to bugged gameplay and poor performance on even higher-end PCs ensured that the game's playerbase would slowly die out just a few years after launch.
Indie Games
As with the trend of indie games in the late 2000s and early 2010s to emulate those made in the 1980s, the indie game scene in the late 10s and early-to-mid 20s was filled with retro titles that sought to replicate graphics from the 90s. More often than not this was referring to early "3D" graphics in lieu of the Nintendo 64 or original PlayStation
[3], although indie games based on early 90s graphics such as
Pizza Tower (2023) still existed.
In a continuation of previous trends from the last decade, horror remained a popular genre within indie gaming. Games such as
Siren Head (2018),
Nun Massacre (2018) and
Demo Disk (2025) tapped into both PS1-style graphics and the concurrent genre of analog horror to give players a uniquely horrifying experience.
PC Gaming and Digital Storefronts
In the 15 years following its launch in 2005, Valve Corporation's digital distribution service Steam had held a stranglehold on the PC gaming distribution market. This began to change with the emergence of the Epic Games Store, made by the developer of
Fortnite (2017) and the Unreal Engine line of game development kits, along with Bethesda's transfer of its
Fallout and
The Elder Scrolls series to its own service, Bethesda Square, in late 2025. By July 2027 Valve had lost its lucrative monopoly, forcing it to regularly improve its services in an attempt to contend with its new competitors.
Video Game Consoles
The ninth generation of video game consoles remained the then-top-of-the-line in non-PC gaming during the 2020s. This was dominated by three major players: the Nintendo Switch (released 2017), Sony's PlayStation 5 (released 2020), and Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Series S (released 2020). Other consoles, such as Sega's attempt to corner the classic console market with the Genesis Rebirth (released 2027), paled in comparison to the three giants.
Nintendo Switch - despite being a decade old by 2027, the Nintendo Switch still remained a high-selling product within the American, European and Japanese console markets. Nintendo and its third-party partners continued to regularly release new titles, such as
Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023),
Kirby's Seaworld Adventure (2025), and
Star Fox 3: Wormgate to the Stars (2027). In a Nintendo Direct video released in July 2027, the company revealed that they were working on a new console, one geared more towards the rising virtual reality scene while still maintaining a focus on non-VR titles. Speculation on what this console would look like soared high among fans for the next two years.
PlayStation 5 - Sales remained relatively high for the PS5 well into the 2020s. The common conception among console gamers was that the PS5 was the system of choice for more mature gamers, as opposed to the "baby game" stigma sometimes associated with the Nintendo Switch. With the announcement of the PlayStation 6 in March 2027, gamers around the world began to anticipate its release, with its 8K video support and nigh-photorealistic graphics hyping them up all the more.
Xbox Series X and Series S - Between the three major video game consoles of the mid-2020s, the twin systems that comprised the fourth generation of Microsoft's Xbox series performed the worst among global markets. The company's strategy of simultaneously releasing two consoles, one optimized for high-performance play and the other more suited for lower-income gamers, served only to confuse plenty of consumers and even dissuade many of them from buying either one. This is not to say that these consoles were a failure - far from it, in fact - but the decline of the Xbox was well underway by the late 2020s, and
ANIMATION
"Although the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s each had their own definitive cartoons that modern consensus has come to agree on -
Ren and Stimpy,
Invader Zim, and
Adventure Time, respectively - no such consensus has emerged for the following decades, even now, after almost a century following their passing. Perhaps this was because in a manner similar to Japanese anime, western animation had become far too diverse for even historians with plenty of hindsight to ascribe a single series to any particular time period."
Kathy Ewart. "Pens, Cels and Rigs: A History of Western Animation", Pacific Province Virtual Publishing, 2114.
Animation, by the mid-2020s a century-old medium with a rich history and variety across the planet Earth, remained an important cultural touchstone of almost every nation with a strong tradition of television. But as the TV grew obsolete in favor of the burgeoning Internet, a general shift began to emerge starting during the COVID-19 pandemic from shows on network television which had to be greenlit by executives to shows produced by independent studios for consumption on the web.
The Golden Era of Internet Animation
Despite having an active scene focused on Newgrounds and later YouTube since the turn of the millennium, internet-based western animation did not truly begin to take off until the post-COVID boom of the early-to-mid 2020s. Series such as
Helluva Boss (2020-5),
Murder Drones (2021-6),
Lackadaisy (2023-9),
The Amazing Digital Circus (2023-7),
Hazbin Hotel (2024-30),
Land of Zombies (2025-7), and
Halloween High (2026-33) regularly achieved tens of millions of views on YouTube and elsewhere on the net. Most of these shows were geared towards adolescents and young adults, and many boasted an animation quality many saw as equal to (or in some cases, even surpassing) those found on traditional television.
This golden age was not necessarily limited to purely online cartoons. The success of Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack's
Smiling Friends (2022) was due in part to its production by Williams Street, the in-house production wing of established cable network Adult Swim, although the prior reputation of both Hadel and Cusack as prominent internet animators should not go unnoted. The off-beat humor of the show and its refreshingly positive attitude would help to spawn many imitations, most notably Arin Hanson's
Where Are We Now?, which lasted one season and was produced for only a few months in 2026 - as opposed to
Smiling Friends's near decade-long stint.
Eastern Animation/"Anime"
Following a long period of niche appeal among Western audiences in the 1990s and 2000s, Japanese animation finally broke out into the international mainstream starting in the 2010s. By the post-COVID era it had well and true broken out into the Western mainstream, although cultural differences between Japan and the West would remain sticking points for many fans and detractors. Japan was not the only country to benefit from this rise in this cultural breakout, however.
Although many animated series produced in Japan would remain quite popular among Western audiences for decades to come, starting in the mid-2020s anime from both China and South Korea began to find a considerable viewer base from North America, Europe and Anglophone Oceania. Shows such as
Genshin Impact (2024),
Miracle of Dragon World (2025), and
Heimofa Walk! (2027) would serve to help project the People's Republic of China as a rising cultural power, albeit with somewhat limited reception and at the cost of drawing criticism from those eager to point out the subtle pro-CCP propaganda (both real and imagined) that was ingrained into many of these shows.
South Korean studios, which for decades had largely been limited to working on outsourced Western projects finally came onto their own in 2026 with the release of the critically acclaimed
Goguryeo Gyeong-gi, a
Game of Thrones-esque fantasy drama which retold a fictionalized version of Korea's Three Kingdoms period. The animated series, which found most of its international audience in the US and Canada, was well-known for embellishing events, introducing characters with little to no historical basis, and incorporating many features of Korean and wider East Asian mythology.
None of this is to discredit the major impact that Japanese anime still had on the global noosphere, however. Shows such as
Spy x Family (2022-3),
Chainsaw Man (2022),
Wind Breaker (2024-6),
Kemono//mimi (2025-30)
[4], and
Tokyo Lunatic Warrior (2027-9)
[5] still found significant viewership among Western audiences. But as the previous paragraphs have shown, the days of Japan's dominance over the eastern animation market were numbered, although future geopolitical developments bought them some additional time.
[1] Morehouse, Mariana.
Capes and Suits: A History of the Superhero Genre. Robinson Interplanetary Publishing, 2231.
[2] GossamaiBizzaro.
Comprehensive Database of Superbeings in Fiction. Federal Institute for Media and Culture, Terra Nova, 1274 AT.
[3] See
Dusk (2018),
Chop Goblins (2022), and
Frags and Flak (2025).
[4] Set in a world divided between
Kemono (full-on anthro animals) and
Kemomimi ("traditional" anime animal people, such as catgirls).
[5] A show about magical girl werewolves.
