The good news about this trilogy - if it really does turn into a trilogy - is that it will have wrapped "Atlas Shrugged" in such a miasma of failure, deep incompetent failure, that it will be fifty years before anyone tries again. There's going to be a new movie version of "John Carter of Mars" before anyone tries "Atlas Shrugged" again.

My grandfather was a professional photographer in a small midwestern town. And he used to say, privately, after a customer had complained about an unflattering portrait: "You take a picture of a cow, and you get a picture of a cow." In that sense, how could any filmed version of "Atlas Shrugged" not fail terribly, losing millions of dollars, and then fail again, losing millions more dollars, and then fail again - as Part III will do in 2014, when it will lose millions of dollars. After all - look at what they're working with as raw material: the Ayn Rand novel that made her decide that maybe novel writing wasn't her thing after all.