If and when the apocalypse hits, the people who watch Hollywood movies will either have the best chance of surviving or will be totally fucked. But either way, it’s a safe bet that the thousands of hours movie fans have spent watching rich, beautiful actors devise increasingly elaborate survival strategies will influence what we do when all hell breaks loose.

If it’s zombies, there’ll be some people who hole themselves up in malls and others who follow Zombieland’s stylized rulebook. Alien invasion? Computer virus, obviously.

If it’s anything like the movie 2012, my best bet will be to get to an airport and hope my ex-wife’s new boyfriend once took recreational pilot lessons — to be fair, if I somehow have to get a girlfriend, get married, get divorced and then give my ex enough time to fall for someone else within the next year, I’m probably in trouble. If the apocalypse is like in The Road, I’ll just admit I’m no Viggo Mortensen and go out of this world the way I’m pretty sure I came in, eating Chunky Soup while listening to Fastball and picking fights with exotic animals.

My plan for the fall of civilization is inspired mostly by Mad Max — assuming Mad Max still likes Jewish people. When the shit hits the fan I’m trading in my minivan for a dirty-as-in-dirrrrrty muscle car and hitting the open road. Hopefully I’ll meet a little mute kid with a boomerang and we’ll hustle our way out of the outback and straight into the Thunderdome.

But if the cause of humanity’s downfall ends up being super-intelligent apes, I’ve got no idea what I’d do. In the trailers for The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the implication seems to be that James Franco does an experiment on one ape, and then all the other apes get angry and start going all genocide all over the place. Which, in my opinion, is a bit of an overreaction.

Presumably, the movie’s going to try and emotionally manipulate the audience by showing us how mistreated Caesar the Ape was, and then we’ll empathize with him when he leads an ape uprising and wipes out all humans until Charlton Heston comes back.

Except that wiping out an entire species is not a proportional response to getting locked up in a cage! If the ape just got some good-natured revenge on the people who wronged him — and by good-natured, I mean gruesome — I’d root for the ape. But even if Franco’s insatiable thirst for affirmation makes him a grade-A asshat, I’m going to be rooting for the human beings with guns when the damned dirty apes start murdering innocent families.

Besides, if you’re going to make an animal super-intelligent, tigers would be cooler.

With all of that said, if I was an ape I’d probably be able to justify eradicating humans if anyone forced me to watch The Change-Up, this weekend’s other new release. If this movie was a two-hour documentary detailing the history of baseball’s least-feared off-speed pitch, it would still be more appealing than this garbage.

Both Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman are talented comedic actors, but doing a movie about waking up in someone else’s body cannot possibly help their careers. I’ve probably watched the cringe-worthy trailer 20 times, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for why two reasonably in-demand movie stars would accept these roles, and all I came up with was that they’d both auditioned for Freaky Friday and are still pissed that Lindsay Lohan got the role.

Elsewhere, as predicted in last week’s Reeltalk, Cowboys and Aliens was a bit of a bomb at the box office. This likely has to do with the fact that, while cowboys are cool, we won’t need them when the aliens invade. We’ve got real heroes like, as mentioned earlier, computer viruses.

Also, The Smurfs movie was a hit. If apes wanted to genocide smurfs, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.