Per Deadline’s report, Sony has entered into talks with German director and disaster fetishist Roland Emmerich to helm their recently-purchased spec script, White House Down, described as Die Hard, but in the White House. Come to think of it, that sounds kind of bad ass.
The script was brought to Sony courtesy of Mark Vanderbilt who, along with his Mythology Entertainment partners, netted a cool $3 million in the deal. Not a bad chunk of change for a spec script. Vanderbilt, you might remember, scripted The Amazing Spider-Man for Sony as well, so this isn’t his first rodeo.
I like Emmerich well enough. Despite some of his more recent clunkers few directors can blow shit up with such maniacal jubilation. Independence Day still holds up visually – better than even some of the more recent CG-laden blockbusters. But an action movie involving an overtaken White House, how is it 2012 and we’re just now arriving at this premise? If this were at Fox I feel like it’d have been retrofitted into Die Hard 5 by now.
