This week on The Flickcast Chris and Matt celebrate a one year anniversary milestone with guest host Elisabeth Rappe. Some of the topics under discussion this week include proposed sequels to Independence Day, a reboot of the Godzilla franchise, the Caprica mid-season finale and the oddity of “Chat Roulette.”

The trio also made some great picks as they always do including Elisabeth’s pick of the Gerard Butler film Beowulf & Grendel, Matt’s pick of AMC’s series Breaking Bad and Chris’ pick of the original Clash of the Titans featuring Laurence Olivier and Harry Hamlin.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook and MySpace or via email.

It’s going to be a very green (as in $) for Roland Emmerich. For a long time Michael Bay seemed to be the go-to mega director in Hollywood. Well, it seems Emmerich, director of the recent disaster movie 2012, is set to change all that. At least in the sense of enormous paydays that is.

2012, which has gone onto make nearly $700 million worldwide (much of that coming from international audiences) since its November release is reported to pay out $100 million to Emmerich alone:

“According to several executives who saw the deal as it was being shopped and signed last year, Emmerich got a traditional $20 million advance against 20 percent of the first-dollar gross profits.

Based on where the box office stands today and the first-dollar gross deal, Emmerich will take home $100 million, all the executives agreed.”

While the dollar figure seems enormous it should be noted that Emmerich is well known for micro-producing his own projects. By the time he brings something to a studio everything is set to go (e.g. budget, storyboards, etc.). Add to this the fact he owned the script, produced and directed 2012 and it becomes pretty clear the man deserved his share, regardless of how grossly inflated it may seem.

Regardless, way to go Emmerich!  I’m sure you’ll put some of that money toward the ID4 sequels you talked about.  Fingers crossed.

In honor of Roland Emmerich‘s release of disaster film  2012 this week I decided to watch sci-fi action classic Independence Day (aka ID4). I can’t tell you on how many levels I love this film. Sure it’s campy at times but the actors seem to believe so ferociously the fictitious alien invasion is real it just works. Moreover, it paved the way for some of the best scenes of destruction ever in film history.

Fans like me have been waiting nearly fourteen years for a sequel and we may get our wish. While promoting 2012 Emmerich spoke to MTV about the possibility of not one, but two ID4 sequels:

“What we want to do in the next – it’s actually two movies – we want to do a bigger arc,” he explained. “‘Independence Day’ was always like the king who leads his troops into battle against an evil force, and that stays like that.”

As exciting as the prospect of two more ID4 films could be allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment. One reason I like the first film so much is that it’s a closed box. That is, it simply ends. No twists, no hints at a sequel, simply an ending. With so many films vying for franchise potential these days it’s refreshing to have movies like ID4 that simply wanted to tell a story-once.

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