Just a little over a week ago it was announced that director Roland Emmerich, known best for his giant-scale disaster movies, would be making his next film a low-key affair. Modeled after the found footage films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, the film would have a cast filled exclusively with unknowns experiencing an alien invasion. Titled The Zone, plot details were being kept under wraps, though two of the main characters were revealed to be a haggard journalist and his cameraman, both of whom had been cast. It turns out that the project isn't happening.

THR reports that sources close to the director and saying that the project is no longer being pursued. Set for a budget of only $5 million, even members of the production are at a loss as to why the film was shut down, though there's some suggestion that it has to do with competing, similar projects such as the recently announced Timur Bekmambetov's Apollo 18, which would have beaten The Zone to theaters by a few weeks.

The article also cites over-saturation of the market as a possible cause, but the fact of the matter is that people are still eating found footage films up and the whole thing is extremely low risk, high reward. When you have a name like Roland Emmerich attached as a director, there's a zero percent chance that the film won't make its budget back. His lowest grossing movie since 1996's Independence Day was 10,000 BC and that still made more than $94 million domestically. Then again, who knows? Maybe this is all just the start of a massive viral campaign that makes the shutdown look like a government conspiracy. Sounds like something Hollywood would do.