Roland Emmerich, the legend behind such disaster classics as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, will be shopping around a new lunar disaster movie next week at the Marché du Film in Cannes. EDIT: the rights to Moonfall have been sold for Germany and Switzerland in an eight-figure deal to a new distribution and production group backed by New York private equity firm KKR.
Moonfall tells the story of, what else, a ragtag bunch of characters battling to save the planet after an asteroid knocks the moon into a collision trajectory with Earth. Emmerich has gone to space and the moon many times before—in Stargate and Moon 44, in addition to the movies listed above—but he also knows how to make mainstream hits such as The Patriot and Anonymous. He even has a war movie coming out this November, Midway, which stars Dennis Quaid, Luke Evans, Aaron Eckhart, Mandy Moore, and Patrick Wilson.
Moonfall will have a $150 million budget. Director Emmerich will share the writing credits with Harald Kloser (2012) and Spenser Cohen (Extinction). Notably, frequent collaborator Dean Devlin (Geostorm, the Independence Day films) is nowhere to be found.
Moonfall is currently in preproduction, with no cast members announced yet. The production is scheduled to begin early in 2020.
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