Are You Ready for Dec. 21, "2012"?
The next time the world ends, apparently, is in just over three years time. But CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports it's coming to a theater near you, in one day.
"Our movie, '2012,' is all about the preparation for the end of the world," producer Mark Gordon says bluntly.
An end of the world predicted, the movie informs us, by the ancient Mayan culture of what is now Mexico, whose sophisticated calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012, at precisely 11 minutes and 11 seconds past six in the morning, Eastern time - if you're counting.
Exactly how the world ends, the Mayans generously left to Hollywood's imagination. And so we get the usual hail of meteors and monstrous tsunamis.
And the requisite heroic struggle of one family to survive, this time led by actor John Cusak.
The Mayans were surprisingly good at calendar making, and they developed a series of time measures including a "long cycle" of 5,125 years - a cycle that ends on Dec. 21, 2012.
End of the World for John Cusack?
Related: NASA's Take on 2012
Related: Mayan Elder Tired of 2012 Queries
"It will be the birth of a new era," says Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012," a book based, like the movie, on the Mayan prophecy. "And like any other birth it will be accompanied by joy and blood and pain."
More joy than pain is the hope in Hollywood. "2012" is just the first of several films linked to the doomsday prophesies for that year.
"The extraordinary thing is that mindless films linked to disasters do so well at the box office during a period of economic difficulty," says film critic Richard Fitzwilliams. "This is not a film interested in truth, but it's been shown clearly in several recent films that bogus prophecies make excellent box office."
As for the director of "2012," Roland Emmerich, whose repertoire of disaster movies includes "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Independence Day," he already has plans for December 21, of 2012.
He'll be skiing on a very tall mountain. If the big waves don't come, he'll just keep skiing.