Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played an important role in the diagnosis and management of cancer since it was first developed, but other modalities also continue to advance and provide complementary information on the status of tumors. In the future, there will be a major continuing role for noninvasive imaging in order to obtain information on the location and extent of cancer, as well as assessments of tissue characteristics that can monitor and predict treatment response and guide patient management. Developments are currently being undertaken that aim to provide improved imaging methods for the detection and evaluation of tumors, for identifying important characteristics of tumors such as the expression levels of cell surface receptors that may dictate what types of therapy will be effective and for evaluating their response to treatments. Molecular imaging techniques based mainly on radionuclide imaging can depict numerous, specific, cellular and molecular markers of disease and have unique potential to address important clinical and research challenges. In this review, we consider what continuing and evolving roles will be played by MRI in this era of molecular imaging. We discuss some of the challenges for MRI of detecting imaging agents that report on molecular events, but highlight also the ability of MRI to assess other features such as cell density, blood flow and metabolism which are not specific hallmarks of cancer but which reflect molecular changes. We discuss the future role of MRI in cancer and describe the use of selected quantitative imaging techniques for characterizing tumors that can be translated to clinical applications, particularly in the context of evaluating novel treatments.