Christopher Meloni has been a busy boy during the pandemic, as the star of Law & Order: Organized Crime also found the time to make a short film titled Out!!! with Brian Taylor, who co-directed the Crank movies starring Jason Statham. Meloni and Taylor previously worked together on Syfy's dark comedy Happy! and you can watch the trailer for their latest collaboration below.

Out!!! will be sold in a first-of-its-kind NFT auction that will grant the buyer full rights and provenance to the full 4k director's cut of the film. Meanwhile, alternate performance takes, bloopers/outtakes, edit variants and even an alternate ending will be offered in the same drop as additional 1/1 NFT auctions. We truly are living in an exciting new age, folks!

The frenetic short finds Meloni playing M Berkoff, a douchebag Manhattan hedgefund manager who learns that a Vesta-sized asteroid is on an apocalyptic collision course with the Earth, where mass extinction is imminent. He has only 42 minutes to tie up all the loose ends in his life before he and everyone else on the planet lose their lives.

“NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a completely game-changing technology -- a way to link unique one-of-one ownership to a digital asset… a film, for instance. I mean anyone can own a Jackson Pollack print. But only one person can own the original," Taylor said in a statement before quoting one of Hollywood's great movie moguls.

"Louis B. Mayer said: ‘This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it.’ This has always been the essence of movies as a business. NFTs can change all that. It's now possible for filmmakers to create singular stories, moments and one-of-a-kind performances that film fans can actually own.”

Based on the wild trailer below, Out!!! certainly seems to earn the exclamation points in its title, and Meloni looks like he's just going for it here, much like Statham does in the Crank franchise. I suppose that's one of Taylor's skills as a filmmaker -- pushing actors to take chances and have fun with inherently pulpy material.

“When you’re working with an insanely creative actor like Chris, it’s a given that amazing takes and choices will end up on the cutting room floor," said Taylor. "One of the most exciting aspects of this project is it opens up possibilities for film fans to have access to moments like this that otherwise would be lost. An unused Meloni take, to me, is like a Van Halen guitar solo that didn’t quite make the album. Imagine being able to actually own something like that.”

It is a pretty nifty (see what I did there) idea... if only I had the dough. Maybe one of you Collider readers is filthy rich and you can buy it for us and debut the short right here on the site. As a "token" of my appreciation, I'd even let you co-write the post with me. Think about it, but think fast, as Out!!! is set to drop on the NFT platform OpeaSea on July 22, when the bidding will really begin. For now, whet your appetite with a look at the trailer below.