sand box

Reportedly (and The New York Times might just be making this up to hurt John McCain), the economy has run into some snags over the past few weeks. This is certainly important, but most of us at recess expect to be poor journalists upon graduation anyway, whether Wall Street is a gaping black hole or not.

More pressing are the myriad effects of a lack of money to throw around, particularly when it's Hollywood whose pockets will be empty.

Basically every major music label has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy since 1999, so this financial swing is of little importance to them.

Hollywood, on the other hand, still expects to make money, and this is going to make the daunting task of getting people to see Eddie Murphy movies all that much harder. Luxury goods, you know. So let's say that hypothetically, you're a big-time movie executive (named Les Grossman) and you're brainstorming (dancing to Ludacris) in your office (war room). What do you do?

Maybe some existing movies will go back to the drawing board and take a slightly different direction. The Curious Chapter 11 Bankruptcy of Benjamin Button, perhaps? It's also likely that more tried and true franchises will be pulled back into the arena, a la Indiana Jones. I mean, I can't imagine that I'm the only one craving Titanic 2-Under the Sea. And if Ocean's 11 can become Ocean's 12 and Ocean's 13, then there's certainly a market for 13 Angry Men, or 30 Going On Menopause.

Spin-offs are another creatively deep, monetarily safe road to take. George Lucas has already discussed a Mutt Williams movie, although if Shia LaBeouf gets many more leading roles he'll probably be subject to federal antitrust laws. Cuba Gooding Jr.'s got a lot of free time these days, so a chronicle of Rod Tidwell's football career would probably be cheap and quick to produce. And despite the best efforts of every major studio, there are still more superheroes hanging around, waiting to be played by Robert Downey Jr.

But wait! People aren't broke yet! That leaves the last ditch effort, one that the music industry has fully latched onto (just ask Kanye): release every single movie before the end of the year, and discontinue production on the rest. People will spend whatever money they've got left, and then when the financial apocalypse finally is upon us, nobody's losing anything.

Plus, when Quentin Tarantino somehow manages to actually follow up on his promise to deliver Inglorious Bastards by Cannes next year, it'll be the only movie debuting in 2009, and nobody will be distracted from the greatest movie ever (to be) made. Win-win situation.