Roland Emmerich announces his new disaster movie Moonfall has begun filming. Emmerich’s reputation as the modern master of disaster movies of course began with the blockbuster success of his alien invasion epic Independence Day, which grossed $817 million worldwide in the summer of 1996.

Emmerich would in fact never quite match the success of Independence Day with his subsequent disaster films, but he definitely gave it his all with releases like 1998’s Godzilla, 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow and 2009’s 2012. In 2016 Emmerich even went back to the alien well a second time with Independence Day: Resurgence, which grossed only $389 million worldwide. Emmerich of course has also made some films that aren’t disaster movies, including the war films The Patriot and Midway, the dubious historical epic 10,000 BC and the badly-received serious drama movie Stonewall.

For his next film Emmerich is returning to the genre he knows best, the disaster movie. The calamitous scenario of Moonfall sees a mysterious force knocking the moon out of its orbit and sending it on a collision course with Earth, and to stop global catastrophe a team is sent to land on the moon and somehow prevent the runaway body from destroying humanity. Work on the movie has indeed now begun, as Emmerich himself revealed in a tweet which can be seen in the space below:


The cast assembling in Montreal to begin work on Moonfall includes Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, Charlie Plummer, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland and Eme Ikwuakor. Josh Gad was originally set to join the cast as well but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, and was replaced by John Bradley, who of course is best known for playing Samwell Tarly on Game of Thrones. The movie’s script is by Spenser Cohen, Emmerich and Harald Kloser.

The premise of Moonfall obviously sounds major echoes of another well-known disaster movie, Michael Bay’s Armageddon, which also concerned a hastily assembled team of would-be heroes on a seemingly suicidal mission to save Earth from cosmic catastrophe. The whole disaster movie genre indeed feels somewhat old-fashioned at this point, and there hasn’t really been a major hit within the category since 2015’s San Andreas, which had the advantage of Dwayne Johnson’s name on the marquee. But Emmerich obviously knows what it’s like to revive an entire genre, as he did when he brought back the alien invasion movie with Independence Day. It remains to be seen if Moonfall can do for old school disaster epics what Emmerich’s 1996 sci-fi blockbuster did for the genre, but all indications are that the movie will have an uphill battle at the box office. It's expected to release in 2021.