In case it had slipped your mind, this is a friendly reminder that the world ends in 2012. It wasn’t only Nostradamus who said it – and he, of course, gets everything right – it’s also in the Mayan calendar and the Bible Codes. The former pegs the date for Armageddon as 21 December 2012, and is based on the legend of a tall white man who emerged one day from the sea, so the evidence is pretty persuasive. The latter was hidden in the five books of Moses by God himself, and speaks quite clearly about a giant comet, which eerily collates with all that stuff on the History Channel. Heck, even the ancients knew that 2012 was when the party would end – Planet Nibiru (you know, the twelfth planet) returns to the neighbourhood every 4,000 years, and when it makes its scheduled stop in three years time it’ll be coming, according to humanity’s first astronomers, with a galactic eviction notice.

What this means for Hollywood is that there’s just over 1,000 days left to make some really profitable blockbusters. Director Roland Emmerich knows this, which is why he’s going to destroy the earth one last time in the movie “2012,” due for US release this week. Emmerich has made a career from pulverizing the earth in celluloid – think Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow – and he promises that the latest action-disaster epic will be his last hurrah. In the movie, a solar flare shoots neutrinos into the earth’s core, causing seas to rise and tectonic plates to shift while a failed novelist turned limo driver (played by John Cussack) fights desperately for survival.

The movie should arrive in South Africa early next year, but The Daily Maverick reckons your time might be better spent working on that concrete bunker.

By Kevin Bloom

Read more: New York Times

WATCH: ‘2012’ trailer