Academy Award- and Razzie-winning actress Halle Berry has been cast in Moonfall, a new science fiction movie from Independence Day filmmaker Roland Emmerich. Set up for a release at Lionsgate and also starring Frozen‘s Josh Gad, the film picks up as “a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact, and against all odds, a ragtag team launches an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love and risking everything to land on the lunar surface and save our planet from annihilation.
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Deadline reports that Berry will play a NASA astronaut-turned-administrator whose previous space mission holds a clue about an impending catastrophe. Production on the film is set to begin in the fall in Montreal.
The film is drawing obvious comparisons to Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis headed up a team of oil drillers who were sent into space to destroy a massive asteroid heading toward Earth. Willis’s co-star, Ben Affleck, should be happy to hear that Berry’s character is at least an astronaut. In Armageddon, Willis plays the leader of a group of working-class oil rig workers, who are tapped by NASA to help save the world by traveling into space and drilling a hole into a massive, approaching asteroid so that it can be blown to pieces before it collides with the Earth and causes catastrophic damage.
Affleck, on the film’s commentary track, took aim at director Michael Bay, saying that when he challenged the filmmaker on why it’s easier to teach oil drillers to go to space than it is to teach astronauts how to drill, Bay told him “go f–k yourself.”
We can’t do justice to Affleck’s rant. You can check it out below, and you’ll be happy you did.
Of course, Berry is no stranger to the genre space. Besides X-Men films and Catwoman, the star has appeared in movies like Gothika and John Wick: Chapter Three. She is expected to return in the next John Wick movie. Gad, meanwhile, has tackled projects like Beauty and the Beast and Pixels alongside his work as Olaf. Disney+ is expected to air a spinoff miniseries centering on the exploits of Gaston and LeFou in the time before the live-action reboot of the beloved animated classic. Currently envisioned as a limited-run event series, the project will hail from Once Upon a Time creators Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who obviously have a good deal of experience turning fairy tale characters into compelling TV — and even tying into Disney’s theatrical priorities to do so. Gad, who played Disney’s first openly-gay protagonist (but drew fire for keeping his sexuality completely silent) in LeFou, will have a good deal of creative input, serving as a writer and producer on episodes of the show.
