The Mayans didn’t do it. (20th Century Fox)

The NoMa Business Improvement District’s slate of movies for the latest edition of its annual summer screening series has a very clear message: “Panic! Mayhem! It’s the end of days!”

Starting May 23 and continuing every Wednesday evening through August 8, this year’s slate of movies features death, destruction and massive property destruction. It’s 2012, after all, and with the Mayan long count calendar set to turn over on December 21, the film series’ organizers want to make sure you’re prepared for any possibility. (Aside from earth crust displacement, because they’re not actually showing Roland Emmerich’s everyone-dies epic 2012.)

Here’s the schedule of films, including each title’s specific disasters:

May 23, The Day After Tomorrow: Climate change, faux Dick Cheney.
May 30, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Nuclear war, Slim Pickens.
June 6, Men in Black: Covetous aliens, Linda Fiorentino.
June 13, Shaun of the Dead: Zombies, asshole roommates who turn into zombies.
June 20, Wall-E: Walmart stand-in, but this movie is just about perfect.
June 27, Ghostbusters: Spectral demons, marshmallow men.
July 4, Independence Day: Destructive aliens, deduct points for obviousness.
July 11, Red Dawn: Surprise invasion by Communist armies, teenagers.
July 18, War Games: 1980s-era computers, it’s not Tron.
July 25, The Incredibles: Supervillains, domestic restlessness.
August 1, Jurassic Park: Dinosaurs, “wtf is dis real.”
August 8, Deep Impact: Earthbound comet, survival lottery.

But, wait! Should we really be associating so much death and chaos with the remnants of an ancient civilization? Local activist and sometimes D.C. Council candidate Bryan Weaver says we should not. In addition to all his good-government efforts, Weaver also runs Hoops Sagrado, an organization that takes at-risk youths from D.C. on trip to Guatemala to spend time with the still-extant Mayan population.

In comments he made in January to the end-of-the-world blog Armageddon Sampler, Weaver said pop-culture fascination with end times has greatly warped Mayan civilization at large and its calendar in particular. One unit on the Mayan calendar, called a baktun, is measured in increments of 144,000 days, or about 394.5 years. On December 21, the 13th baktun is scheduled to end, but that doesn’t mean imminent doom, just the beginning of the 14th baktun.

“[Mayans] look at it far more as a rebirth than as armageddon,” Weaver told DCist. “As a marketing standpoint it makes for a perfect thing. But what gets to me is that it’s not a dead culture. Some people still speak it as their first language.”

Not that there’s not some pop-culture fun to be had with the Mayan calendar. After Dick Clark died earlier this month, a friend emailed Weaver, writing, “New Year’s Eve will never be the same. Well done, Mayans.” Weaver said he appreciated the tongue-in-cheek joke.

And after considering some of the filmes on the NoMa Summer Screen, Weaver checked some of their original release dates against Mayan astrology. Shaun of the Dead, which debuted in April 2004, did so under the sign of Nahual Sotz, an animal protector who transforms into a bat.

Likewise, Ghostbusters, in which Sigourney Weaver’s character is possessed by a demon named “Zool” is rife with subtext. “‘Xul’ or ‘Zul’ is a jaguar and the word means ‘end’ in Quiche,” a Mayan language, Weaver said. “That line that there is ‘No Dana, only Zool’ is maybe really prophetic.”

So perhaps by the time the 13th baktun ends some time in the early 25th century, our descendants will have figured out that while its fun to watch a movie in which dinosaurs eat us or aliens blow us up or we nuke ourselves into oblivion, the Mayans had nothing to do with it.