Roland Emmerich makes a new alien invasion movie… for cheap?

UPDATE: Well, so much for that. Heat Vision was informed that Emmerich has pulled the plug on the below project for undisclosed reasons (with the impending abundance of “found footage” movies likely the main suspect). Emmerich will instead return to noisy, brainless and ridiculously expensive popcorn movies, one assumes.

Previously:

October 29, 2010: Roland Emmerich has become synonymous with excess, spending several hundred million dollars to cause preposterous amounts of global property damage in movies like INDEPENDENCE DAY, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and 2012.

Now the filmmaker is dialing it down to a fraction of his usual destruction and price tag (around $5 million) for a “stealth project” called THE ZONE. The top secret alien invasion movie will apparently be improv-based and presented in the CLOVERFIELD / BLAIR WITCH / PARANORMAL ACTIVITY “found footage” style popular for genre material with slender budgets.

No other firm details are known yet, although THR claims that “two leads were just cast, one playing a haggard journalist in his 40s or 50s, the other a black man in his early to mid 20’s, the cameraman.”

As a point of comparison, the impending FX-filled alien invasion flick SKYLINE reportedly cost around $10 million to make, while Emmerich spent north of $200 million to trash the planet in 2012. Should be interesting to see what he does with much, much less.