Media musing of the day

If, as Edward Jay Epstein suggests in his always-prescient Slate column, product placement will become crucial to movie financing, what does that mean for movie genres that don’t lend themselves to product placement? Not many products can be promoted in a movie set in 1776 or 3048 or, for that matter, 1941. Does more product placement = more movies set in contemporary consumer-driven middle class America?