Roland Emmerich Acquires And Plans On Directing Another Alien Invasion Film

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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With his next big explosive summer flick White House Down releasing in just three weeks, director Roland Emmerich is hard at work on his next project. The thing is, he’s got quite a few already in different stages of development, and he just added another one. Hey, Roland, save some of that Earth destruction for other directors, will ya? There’s only so much to go around.

Emmerich’s Centropolis Entertainment just purchased a potential tentpole feature called Emergence from screenwriter Nic Kelman, and the director fully intends on making it. While no details for the script are available, it’s said to be an original take on a modern alien invasion story. Sure, it’s subject matter that has been tackled a thousand times before, but 985 of those 1,000 tries was unmemorable.

The wildcard here is screenwriter/novelist Kelman, who graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science in Brain and Cognitive Studies, and then got his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing – Fiction from Brown University. The script is likened to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, inasmuch as both are firmly based on actual scientific theories rather than just pure speculation. He’s currently writing a film called Outpost for Transformer franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

It seems strange that Emmerich would choose an alien invasion flick right in the middle of his pre-production phase on an Independence Day sequel. Of course, he blew the White House up in the original, and White House Down isn’t exactly miles away from that subject matter, so it’s obvious this guy works in small cycles. He is also possibly directing an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov classic Foundation, and is supposed to have that Singularity project somewhere in the pipeline.

What’s clear is that large-scale original science fiction is still a major draw for one of Hollywood’s biggest directors, and that’s just fine with us. Welcome to Earth!