Roland Emmerich directing low-budget alien invasion movie

If there's one thing that Roland Emmerich is good at, it's blowing things up on a grand scale.

As a director, he has always erred on the side of vastness. Some of his large scale filmic feats have included: blowing up the White House ( Independence Day ), freezing New York ( The Day After Tomorrow ), and ending the world ( 2012 ).

With Shakespearean thriller Anonymous currently in post production, The Hollywood Reporter has news that Emmerich is scaling down for Zone .

The under-the-radar production is apparently a found-footage thriller in the vein of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity , and will see Emmerich working with a budget of $5 million (a tiny fraction of what he's used to).

There's rumours that a couple of unknowns have been cast, and that the alien invasion movie will be largely improv-based.

Emmerich's films have always been impressive in terms of spectacle, but disappointing on a character level: will these restrictive working conditions force him to up the ante in terms of story and performance?

Or is it a cynical cash-in based on the profit-to-budget ratios of recent hits like Cloverfield , Paranormal Activity and Gareth Edwards' Monsters ?

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Up for another alien invasion flick or fed up with found-footage? Rant below!

Matt Maytum
Editor, Total Film

I'm the Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the running of the mag, and generally obsessing over all things Nolan, Kubrick and Pixar. Over the past decade I've worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at GamesRadar+, and you can often hear me nattering on the Inside Total Film podcast. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.