The sort of people who habitually fall back on the phrase “you couldn’t make it up!” usually couldn’t.

Still, there must be thousands of wannabe screenwriters out there slowly chipping away at a creative block the size of Belgium, and while a little artistic license is always going to be crucial, we reckon the newsstands are a good bet for stumbling on some primo Hollywood fodder..

So we've taken a few recent news stories and pitched them as movies. Studios - stick yer rights requests in the comments...

Reality: Pet dog gets lost at sea, swims through shark infested waters, survives for four months on a desert island eating wild goats.

Adaptation: This one hardly needs messing with at all, but we’d certainly play up the ‘swimming through shark-infested waters’ bit – perhaps even a knuckle-gnawing CGI scrap sequence? Oh, and also, our dog would be able to talk. And it wouldn’t end up all vicious and post-traumatic and bitey at the end. It’d become the world’s most successful (and only?) lifeboat dog.

Starring: Get the 22 different Labradors used in the making of Marley & Me on the phone - this is going to be an epic.

Title: Paws vs Jaws

Tagline: How do you go walkies when you’re five miles from land?