Roland Emmerich wants to crash the Moon into the Earth

There’s just no keep­ing Roland Emmerich down. The guy can seem­ing­ly sur­vive any­thing, whether that’s tsuna­mi after tsuna­mi of neg­a­tive reviews, an out­cry from the LGBT+ com­mu­ni­ty that his gay rights movie was actu­al­ly pret­ty offen­sive, or bare­ly recoup­ing the costs of pro­duc­tion on his lat­est fea­ture Mid­way.

Flag­ging box-office returns and crit­i­cal antipa­thy be damned, he’s already hot on the trail of his next fea­ture, and its premise sounds like the result of feed­ing every Roland Emmerich movie into an algo­rithm and see­ing what it spits out. Hav­ing destroyed the Himalayas and the White House and the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty and pre­sum­ably the memo­r­i­al to Bewitched pro­tag­o­nist Saman­tha Stephens in Salem, Mass­a­chu­setts, he’s final­ly run out of land­marks to incin­er­ate. His next tar­get: the plan­et itself.

The upcom­ing project Moon­fall is exact­ly what it sounds like: Emmerich wants to crash the god­damn Moon into the god­damned Earth. Accord­ing to Dead­line, the film will cen­ter on a ​“mys­te­ri­ous force” knock­ing the Moon from its orbit, send­ing it on a col­li­sion course with the universe’s only known home for intel­li­gent life.

Of course there will be a last-ditch res­cue mis­sion, but will their tac­tic be to some­how steer the Moon clear of its tar­get, or to keep things sim­ple and blow up the celes­tial object respon­si­ble for the tides? I, for one, can­not wait to find out. The script has been whipped up by Emmerich along with his col­lab­o­ra­tors on 2012, Harold Klos­er and Spenser Cohen, so mass destruc­tion will be all but guaranteed.

As with Mid­way, Emmerich has tak­en leave for Chi­na in order to rus­tle up the $150-mil­lion-plus bud­get required to ful­ly real­ize his gar­gan­tu­an vision of dev­as­ta­tion; it is per­haps the last coun­try in the world that still believes in the fun­da­men­tal earn­ing pow­er of a direc­tor who gets a lit­tle far­ther from the main­stream with every new release.

But no mat­ter if he must for­sake Hol­ly­wood for Asia – Roland Emmerich won’t stop mak­ing movies until he dies. Which will prob­a­bly be due to plan­e­tary impact on a cat­a­clysmic scale.