Roland Emmerich, the best-selling filmmaker behind ‘Independence Day,’ ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and the upcoming ‘Moonfall’, has credited ‘Star Wars’ and the superhero movies pumped up by Marvel and DC as ‘ruining’ the Film Industry. Emmerich’s “Moonfall,” backed by Lionsgate and made on a reported budget of around $140 million, is the increasingly rare example of a quirky Hollywood tentpole.
“Oh yeah,” Emmerich told Den of Geek when asked if the disaster genre has changed in recent years. “Because naturally Marvel and DC Comics and Star Wars have pretty much taken over. It’s kind of ruining our industry because nobody’s doing anything original anymore.
Emmerich later added, “You should make bold new movies, you know? And I think, actually, Christopher Nolan is the master of that. He’s someone who can make movies about whatever he wants. I have a little more trouble, but I still have a big enough name – especially when it’s a disaster [movie] or has some sort of disaster theme.
While Emmerich dabbled in franchises with his 2016 sequel “Independence Day: Resurgence,” he later went on to state publicly that he regretted doing the critical and commercial flop. The director noted that the loss of original “Independence Day” star Will Smith to “Suicide Squad” made “Resurgence” another unremarkable, unoriginal Hollywood sequel.
“I should have stopped doing the movie because we had a much better script, and then I had to, really quickly, cobble together another script,” Emmerich told Yahoo. “I should have said no because all of a sudden I was doing something I blamed myself for: a sequel.”
Emmerich has no plans these days to join the Marvel or “Star Wars” franchises, and he attributes his dislike of those franchises to growing up in Germany. The filmmaker said: “There was [‘The Adventures of Tintin’ comics], but they were very childish and there were no superheroes. That’s why, at the very beginning, superheroes didn’t work in Germany. It took them 10 or 15 years [of movies] to reach the same level as the rest of the world… But I never found any interest in this kind of film.
In November 2019, Emmerich told Insider that his “glassy eyes” whenever he watches Marvel movies. “I watch them on the plane so I can fall asleep,” he added.
Nor should Emmerich fans expect the director to make a disaster movie related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The filmmaker said Variety’s Marc Malkin earlier this week that he doesn’t want to make movies about ‘people who are sick’, adding: ‘It’s a very depressing thing. They did ‘Contagion’ and it was a cool movie, but not really one of my favorites.
“Moonfall” opens in theaters nationwide on February 4.
