Roland Emmerich’s Centropolis Entertainment has acquired Emergence, a pitch for a large scale contemporary science fiction film by scribe Nic Kelman, says Deadline.

Emmerich, pictured, plans to direct the film, which is a new take on an alien invasion story containing hot-button science elements.

Emmerich’s track record, going back to Independence Day, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, is to come to the marketplace with a script, a budget, a start date, and his commitment to direct. And studios like Fox and Sony have responded by paying huge sums against extravagant back ends because they could see the whole picture and it enabled them to slot an event film right into their slates. Emmerich’s big-scale movies almost always become big hits globally.

Emmerich has other projects in the pipeline that are further along, including Singularity and an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov sci-fi classic Foundation, so it’s unclear which movie will be next. He has also been in the mix on sequels to Independence Day.