Roland Emmerich will direct 'White House Down'

Like some sort of megalomaniac super villain, Roland Emmerich is a man who loves nothing more than to blow things up and smash the world to smithereens in more elaborate and ridiculous ways. Whether it be with aliens ('Independence Day') a giant mutated lizard ('Godzilla'), the weather ('The Day After Tomorrow') or just through the simplicity of neutrinos and polar shifts ('2012'), Emmerich is a man who loves to destroy the world. He's even taking to destroying a certain bard's reputation ('Anonymous'), but now it looks like Emmerich will be back to his old tricks by signing on to direct Sony spec script 'White House Down' from writer James Vanderbilt. Last week it was reported that Sony had snatched up Vanderbilt's script for the hefty price of $3 million, the highest sum for a spec so far this year. Plot details are so far kept under wraps but the film is being touted as an action drama about a para-military takeover of the White House and is described as 'Air Force One' meets 'Die Hard'. You can probably determine much of the details yourselves just from that too be honest. Deadline reports that Emmerich and his producing partner Harald Kloser will join Vanderbilt and his Mythology Entertainment partners Bradley Fischer and Laeta Kalogridis to produce the film with production slated to begin later in the fall. Emmerich will then follow 'White House Down' with 'Singularity' at Columbia which still remains a high priority for them. Vanderbilt himself is a writer very much in demand at the moment. His next script to see the light of day will be 'The Amazing Spider-Man' out this summer, for which he's already working on the sequel. He is also finding time to adapt 'Red Riding' for Steve Zaillian's Film Rites and Ridley Scott and is also polishing the script for Jose Padhila's reboot/remake of 'Robocop'. I can't help but find that this concept sounds very similar to 'Olympus Has Fallen', a project that Gerard Butler and Millennium Films were reported to be working on last month with writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. That story is also said to be about a terrorist take over of the White House with an ex-secret service agent out to take them down. Hmmmm...