Roland Emmerich's Disaster Movie Moonfall Set for February 2022

Lionsgate has announced that filmmaker Roland Emmerich's new disaster movie, the sci-fi film Moonfall, will be released on February 4, 2022. As the name implies, the movie is literally about the moon falling out of the sky. Like so many other of the filmmaker's projects, Moonfall has a stacked ensemble cast including Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Peña, Charlie Plummer, Kelly Yu, Eme Ikwuakor, Carolina Bartczak and Donald Sutherland. According to a report from Deadline, the film has a reported budget of $140 million, making it one of the largest budgeted independent movies in quite some time.

The official description for Moonfall reads: "In the film, 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 the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler (Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all – but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Wilson), and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (Bradley) believe her. The unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space only to find out that our moon is not what we think it is."

Emmerich directed the film, co-writing the script with his 2012 and 10,000 BC collaborator Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen.

To date the German filmmaker's entire filmography has been defined primarily by sci-fi and disaster movies, with Moonfall seemingly combining the two into one. 1994's Stargate would put Emmerich on the map for Hollywood but 1996's Independence Day made him a household name. Some of his other major hits would include the climate-change disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the end-of-the-world themed 2012, the "Die Hard in the White House" thriller White House Down, and the historical film The Patriot starring Mel Gibson. Emmerich previously went to the moon in a story with 1990's Moon 44.

Production on the film was originally scheduled to begin in the spring of 2020, but was forced to shut down due to COVID-19.

"We were in full pre-production in Canada," Emmerich previously told Deadline. "We were seven weeks out from shoot. Then Covid hit. I had an inkling something was wrong. All businesses closed so I went back to LA and into quarantine. Our completion bond didn't cover Covid so we were up in the air for three-four months.

Emmerich's collaborator Harald Kloser also said that Moonfall is "written as the beginning of a saga" and "opens the door onto an epic adventure." Perhaps Marsfall will arrive in 2024.