Independence Day is a 1996 American science fiction action film directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Emmerich and the film's producer Dean Devlin. The film stars an ensemble cast of Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, and Vivica A. Fox. The film follows disparate groups of people who converge in the Nevada desert in the aftermath of a worldwide attack by a powerful extraterrestrial race. With the other people of the world, they launch a counterattack on July 4—Independence Day in the United States.
Roland Emmerich is a German film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is widely known for his science fiction and disaster films and has been called a "master of disaster" within the industry. His films, most of which are English-language Hollywood productions, have made more than $3 billion worldwide, including just over $1 billion in the United States, making him the 17th-highest-grossing Hollywood director of all time.
Dan Lin is a Taiwanese-American film and television producer. He is the chairman of Netflix Films and the founder of Rideback, a film and television production company that he formed in 2008. Lin produced Warner Bros.' Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, The Lego Ninjago Movie, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, and the horror film It, which holds the record for highest-grossing horror film. Lin also produced Disney's Aladdin, a live action adaptation of the 1992 animated feature.
Godzilla is a 1998 American monster film directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich. Produced by TriStar Pictures, Centropolis Entertainment, Fried Films, and Independent Pictures, and distributed by TriStar, it is a reboot of Toho Co., Ltd.'s Godzilla franchise. It is also the 23rd film in the franchise and the first Godzilla film to be completely produced by a Hollywood studio. The film stars Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria, Kevin Dunn, Michael Lerner, and Harry Shearer. The film is dedicated to Tomoyuki Tanaka, the co-creator and producer of various Godzilla films, who died in April 1997. In the film, authorities investigate and battle a giant monster who migrates to New York City to nest its young.
Zilla is a fictional monster, or kaiju, in Toho Co., Ltd.'s Godzilla media franchise. The character first appeared in Godzilla (1998), released by TriStar Pictures. It was initially created as a reimagining of Godzilla but was later re-branded as a separate character appearing alongside Toho's Godzilla. Patrick Tatopoulos designed it after iguanas with a slim theropod appearance rather than the thick, bipedal designs of Toho's Godzilla. TriStar's Godzilla, both the film and character, were negatively received by fans and critics. In 2004, it was featured in Toho's Godzilla: Final Wars as "Zilla". Afterwards, Toho trademarked new incarnations as Zilla, with only the iterations from the 1998 film and animated series retaining the Godzilla copyright and trademark.
Terry Rossio is an American screenwriter and film producer. He co-wrote the films Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro, Shrek, and all five of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. For Shrek, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won the Annie Award for Writing in a Feature Production and BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He often collaborates with fellow screenwriter Ted Elliott.
Moon 44 is a 1990 English-language German science fiction action film from Centropolis Film Productions, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Michael Paré and Lisa Eichhorn alongside Brian Thompson and Malcolm McDowell. The film is set on a futuristic mining site on Moon 44, where convicts and teenage technicians are partnered. An undercover agent (Paré) must discover what has happened to missing corporate shuttles.
Dean Devlin is an American screenwriter, producer, director, and actor of film and television. He is best known for his collaborations with director Roland Emmerich, and for his work on the Librarian and Leverage television franchises. He is a co-founder of the production companies Centropolis Entertainment and Electric Entertainment.
Patrick Tatopoulos is a Greek-French production designer and director who lives and works in the United States. His designs have appeared in numerous motion pictures, including Pitch Black; Underworld; I, Robot; The Chronicles of Riddick; Independence Day; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Stargate; Spawn; Godzilla; Stuart Little; 300; I Am Legend; Man of Steel; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Justice League; 10,000 BC and Live Free or Die Hard.
Godzilla is a Japanese monster, or kaiju, franchise centering on the titular character, a prehistoric reptilian monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. The films series are recognized by the Guinness World Records as the "longest continuously running film series", having been in ongoing production since 1954, with several hiatuses of varying lengths. There are 38 Godzilla films: 33 Japanese films produced and distributed by Toho Co., Ltd., and five American films; one by TriStar Pictures and four films by Legendary Pictures.
Electric Entertainment, Inc. is an American independent television and media production company, established in 2001 by veteran writer/producer Dean Devlin and led by Devlin along with partners Marc Roskin and Rachel Olschan.
Legendary Entertainment, LLC is an American mass media and film production company based in Burbank, California, founded by Thomas Tull. The company has often collaborated with the major studios, including Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures, as well as streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. Since 2016, Legendary became a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group, with American equity firm Apollo buying a minority stake in 2022. In 2024, Legendary bought out Wanda's stake, making the former and Apollo equal partners.
Marc Weigert is an Emmy-award-winning film producer and film/TV visual effects supervisor and 2nd unit director.
Joey, known as Making Contact in the United States, is a 1985 West German techno-horror-fantasy film from Centropolis Film Productions. The film was co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich.
VisionArt Design & Animation was a motion picture and television visual effects company, founded in the 1980s by David Rose and Todd Hess. Though originally a small Orange County company working primarily on cable TV advertisements and flying logos, VisionArt moved to Santa Monica in 1992, winning its first major effects work with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The studio originated in Santa Ana, California, later moved to Santa Monica, California, and closed its doors in 2000.
The Mark Gordon Company is an American production company owned by Mark Gordon. It is notable for their output, including feature films, like Speed, many of Roland Emmerich's films Gordon produced like The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 B.C. and 2012, and TV shows like Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, The Rookie and Ray Donovan.
Independence Day: Resurgence is a 2016 American science fiction action film co-written, directed, and co-produced by Roland Emmerich and co-written and co-produced by Dean Devlin, serving as a sequel to Independence Day (1996). It stars an ensemble cast that consists of Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope, William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Judd Hirsch. The film takes place twenty years after the events of the first film, during which the United Nations has collaborated to form the Earth Space Defense, an international military defense and research organization. Through reverse engineering, the world has fused the power of alien technology with humanity's and laid the groundwork to resist a second invasion.
Midway is a 2019 war film directed by Roland Emmerich, who also produced the film with Harald Kloser, and written by Wes Tooke. The film covers the first six months in the Pacific Theater of World War II, from the Attack on Pearl Harbor to the titular Battle of Midway. The film stars Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Tadanobu Asano, Darren Criss, and Woody Harrelson.
The film industry and video game industry have a long and detailed common history – the two industries have collaborated many times since the 1980s. This includes collaboration between people from both industries and projects resulting in products such as video games, film adaptations of video games, among other things.
The following is a list of unproduced Roland Emmerich projects in roughly chronological order. During his long career, German filmmaker Roland Emmerich has worked on several projects which never progressed beyond the pre-production stage under his direction. Some of these fell into development hell, were officially cancelled, or would see life under a different production team.
