The New York Times took a close look at Hollywood's upcoming roster of depressing movies and how box office sales could shape up, due to the cold hard recession many theater-goers are experiencing. Will the massive lay-offs and pay cuts hinder us from tuning into movies about the end of the world — simply because we can watch the world collapse comfortably from our sofas on CNN? Will escapism be the next Dark Knight, sales-wise?

Already, less-than-cheery movies such as The Changeling, Australia and Body of Lies have failed quite miserably at the box office, while lighter fare High School Musical 3 and Four Christmases soared after the stock market took its plunge.

Twilight (the home of shiny/dreamy vampires) cost practically a nickel to make, and raked in the profits by touting love and chastity instead of gruesome vampiric blood sucking.

But as many producers are now noticing all of the depressing epic scifi movies they green-lit before the financial end of days are now competing with real life problems audience members are going through. Will there still be love for super depressing scifi movieThe Book Of Eli, a sad tale about a barren post-apocalyptic Earth?

Universal Pictures is preparing accordingly, scrapping a planned Bobby Fisher drama. Instead, Universal is moving forward with the movie adaptation of the graphic novel Scott Pilgrim vs. The World with beloved Michael Cera.

Even the highly anticipated movie adaptation of Cormack McCarthy's The Road was pushed back — rumor has it, because it was deemed "too depressing" by test audiences. If you're looking for a happy-go-lucky The Road, then you may have to rewrite the entire thing or just wait until this whole financial mess passes us over.

So will dystopian fare make way for zombie musicals and or "Oops, My Wedding Is On The Apocalypse" dramedies? Here's hoping, but just keep that Zac Efron kid out of my scifi, unless you turn him into a centaur or something. And let's all keep our fingers crossed that they don't try and lighten Eli as it already has an amazing cast of Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington who were put on this Earth to strike terror and sadness in the hearts of movie-goers.

The economy in Second Life exists without external regulation, which enabled the creation of Ginko Financial, a bank set up inside the vitual world. The bank accepted Second Life’s virtual Linden dollars at a 40 percent interest rate, then charged extremely high interest rates for its loans. Thousands of investors poured their money into Ginko, but when people started pulling their accounts en masse, the bank was unable to pay its promised interest rate, and it folded. Because of the relationship between the ongoing US financial crisis and banking deregulation, some researchers have drawn an analogy between Ginko and the US banks.

"I don't view 'Second Life' as a game," said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I view it as a market space."

"The 'Second Life' financial markets have pretty much been unregulated…There are accusations that people are doing everything from questionable behavior to outright fraud."

Because Ginko’s virtual collapse had real world implications for Second Life users who paid US dollars for their Linden bucks, Second Life creator Linden Labs no longer allows banks to pay interest on deposits. But financial researchers still have plenty of reasons to examine Second Life and other virtual environments to look at the ways that entrepreneurs and consumers operate in their virtual test tubes.

[MSNBC]

While I'm happy the slump is saving the Sarah Connor Chronicles, I fear that the price is too high. What kind of world is this when a show about a talking car is remade and even the rehab-bound lead actor from the original who hosts a national talent show won't go near it? But apparently desperate times call for terrible television.

According to The Hollywood Reporter's sources, the financial crisis and the amount of money it costs to market a new show, plus the lack of new programming due to the writer's strike, formed an unholy trifecta that made it worth keeping underperforming shows on the air.

At the same time, even the more successful shows aren't doing that great. Golden Girls and Desperate Housewives producer Marc Cherry pointed this out at the New York TV Festival, telling the audience that the number of viewers for past shows were millions of eyes higher than the current ratings. I blame the computer.

Time to embrace the future that is TV on the laptop, Hollywood.

[THR]

The Undead Roam The Streets

A Little More On Zombie Con

The zombie romp started near Madison Square Garden. The undead dragged their broken limbs through the streets and into Macy's, Manhattan Mall, Victoria's Secret and all the way down to the Lower East Side. After stopping for a brief alcohol fused zombie dance party, they went in search for brains on the train all the way down to Wall Street. Stopping only to crawl all over the Charging Bull, run into windows, spill their undead blood on the streets and make small children uncomfortable.

Video by Chris Person.

The Barcelona-based international conservation agency publishes its Sampled Red List Index to give a quick representation of trends in the natural selection market (graphic from New Scientist). Only 2.5 percent of all known plants and animals have been documented, and while that number might be a bit misleading, the process for seeing exactly which species were in danger was a cumbersome one. IUCN uses random samplings of 1500 species to assess larger risk. While cruder, such estimates can give a quick idea of the threat level before it's too late.

As you can see, the danger is most pressing in the mammalian sector. Although humpback whales are swimming back from extinction, many precious mammalian species are at risk. Marine mammals are the usual target, specifically those in northern oceans, according to an article that appeared in Science.

Viewing animals like shares reveals vanishing species [New Scientist]