Such dizzying spec script payouts are unusual, but not unknown – David Guggenheim’s script for Safe House sparked a bidding war among studios two years ago, and the resulting movie made $200 million for Universal earlier this year. The reason for Sony’s excitement over Vanderbilt’s story, we suspect, is because of its high-concept billing: Die Hard in the White House. A couple of months ago, White House Down was a spec script (that is, written without any promise of purchase by a major studio), before Sony snapped it up for a staggering $3million. The reason we know this is because Vanderbilt’s script has enjoyed an unusual amount of industry buzz. Sure, it’s got explosions and violence in it, but this is more of a pure action movie in the pure 80s mode than the post Irwin Allen disaster stuff we’ve become accustomed to. White House Down, meanwhile, may prove to be another departure for Emmerich. Yawn.” Such apathy’s understandable, we suppose, particularly in light of the aforementioned 2012, which almost felt like an absurdly over-the-top parody of the modern disaster genre, and also Emmerich’s last movie, Anonymous, an ill-advised attempt at a historical conspiracy drama. By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Channing Tatum’s been in talks to star in Roland Emmerich’s forthcoming White House Down, an action movie written by James Vanderbilt, a hotshot writer whose The Amazing Spider-Man, Total Recall and RoboCop reboots will be illuminating multiplexes soon (very soon, in the case of Spidey and Total Recall). Now, given Emmerich’s career to date, which has seen him blow up famous landmarks (including the White House) in such action disaster epics as Independence Day and 2012, most interweb comments have boiled down to, “Oh good, another action disaster epic where the White House gets blown up.
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