John Cusack has had a solid film career for a quarter-century now, but lately he seems to be going through some sort of mid-career midlife crisis. The Martian Child was disappointing at the box office, Grace Is Gone was flat-out disastrous, and War, Inc., which John wrote, directed, and starred in, isn’t looking good. So John is taking some drastic steps. Specifically, he’s preparing to make a risky venture into artistic prostutution by signing up for Roland Emmerich’s next exercise in apocalyptic kitsch, 2012.

I’m not kidding about the risk. Granted, all of Emmerich’s films have been more or less idiotic, even as far back as Independence Day. But they seem to get steadily stupider over time, and this latest project has a plot that makes The Da Vinci Code sound like a piece of hardheaded documentary realism. Nevertheless, all these movies have made huge gobs of money. Cusack seems to be gambling that the reputation he earned from movies like High Fidelity will survive a star turn in a highly profitable chunk of world-ending, CGI-heavy Roland Emmerich crap. If the gamble pays off, he’ll be back in the saddle—a proven moneymaker with high audience recognition and, presumably, lots of attractive offers from the studios. Right now, a Roland Emmerich film looks like a pretty safe bet. 10,000 BC has made a quarter of a billion dollars!? You know, maybe the world really is coming to an end.