This a dialogue from the movie The Secret of My Success (1987)
Short background story: a young guy from Kansas moves to New York City in high hopes that he will build a more interesting and financially better life. He's already got a job there and the following is what happens to him on his first day of work as he shows up at the office.
— Hi, I'm Brantley Foster from Kansas. You hired me. I start work here today.
— You're fired, kid. Sorry. We all saw it coming, but we looked for some kind of miracle. Miracle never happened.
— What did happen?
— Hostile takeover. Ninety percent of the people in this building are out on the street. You are one of those ninety percent. Tough break.
— Mr. Forbush, I was counting on this job. What do I do now?
— Punt! (and he leaves)
I don't seem to be able to figure out what exactly Mr. Forbush, the boss of the company that just went out of business, means by that.
Best Answer
I can't claim to speak from an area of great experience here -I'm not much of a sports guy, but here's how I've usually interpreted the expression.
To punt is to close your eyes, kick the ball as hard as you can and hope for the best. It's basically the equivalent of giving up on formulating a viable strategy and just blindly swinging as hard as you can.
In American football a team that does not think it can score a touchdown may instead chose to give up on scoring and instead punt the ball further downfield to simply put the other team at a disadvantage. So "punting" literally means to kick strongly but usually implies either a lack of strategy, giving up, delaying or gambling.
It may have slightly different meanings depending on context. In politics "punting" is linked to the expression "kicking the can down the road", or dodging responsibility by leaving a mess for someone in the future to clean up. Perhaps the most frequent common usage is to "punt on" an issue or question by leaving it unaddressed. It appears the British (and possibly others) use the phrase to represent a large gamble, but I'm less familiar with this usage and the sports analogy may differ for rugby.
Since it is a slang term it may be difficult to say exactly what was intended here, there are a few different interpretations.
I suspect in this movie, the boss is telling him that he is screwed, and has no viable strategy remaining. So the boss is probably telling him either to "give up" or "pray".