As the less-than-positive reviews start flowing in for INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, Roland Emmerich – disaster movie extraordinaire – appears to be shifting his concentration to his next end-of-the-world flick which has now landed at Universal. MOONFALL is next on Emmerich's docket, and Universal just dropped seven figures on the price tag to acquire the spec script the director penned with his 2012 collaborators Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen. Emmerich will helm this picture as well, which Universal is putting on the fast track, because what studio doesn't want to line up a big destruction porn tentpole for the soonest summer they can find?
So what is MOONFALL about? It certainly doesn't take a genius to guess if you take the title literally. The sky will actually be falling, with your typical band of unlikely heroes having to join forces in order to save the world from the moon, which has fallen out of orbit and is heading straight for a collision with Earth. Oh, how I hope he manages to convince Bruce Willis to head up there with a group of deep-sea oil drillers to… Huh? That's been done before? Dammit!! I thought I was onto something here.
On paper, it all sounds so stupid, but let's not forget that the public once went out and paid money to see an Emmerich film in which Jake Gyllenhaal is chased by cold air, so… yeah, it doesn't sound like a bad bet for Universal now, does it?