Fox has acquired the rights to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which is either every Roland Emmerich movie ever made or the dumbest idea for a movie ever.

A best-seller and critical favorite, its premise is life on Earth if humans were suddenly to disappear. Weisman explores how edifices and houses would deteriorate, which man-made objects would last, the environmental impact of nuclear waste and other pollutants and how nature would spread over built environments.

Ooh, two hours of time-lapse photography.  I’m spurting my shorts just thinking about it.

Fox does not aim to make a documentary but rather a fictional feature buttressed by the book’s science. It would, for example, show an event that would lead to man’s disappearance.

Let me get this straight: you wanted to make a movie about events that happen before the beginning of a non-fiction book?  I… I don’t think you have to buy the rights for that…

Mark Protosevich will write the script, and Francis Lawrence will direct. They tackled similar material with the sci-fi monster movie “I Am Legend,” which featured Will Smith as the only man left in post-apocalyptic New York. [Reuters]

You’re right, a sci-fi monster movie is totally similar to a book about bridges decaying.  I’m the idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking.  You know, I have a feeling the way this went down was, a Fox exec saw a best-seller list by accident one day, then the next morning, he walked into the board meeting:

EXEC: Gentleman, do you know what this is?  *flutters pages* It’s… a book.

CROWD:  Ooooh…