Channing Tatum will save the Presidency in Roland Emmerich's 'White House Down'

When we refer to Channing Tatum as the "John Cena of Hollywood", we do it out of love. The guy has worked his butt off to become a legit star, despite people constantly knocking him for his looks and tendency to be shirtless.  He's had one heck of a 2012 already, scoring two huge hits in The Vow and 21 Jump Street, while also banging out an artsy action flick in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. Now he'll venture into solo action hero territory as the lead in Roland Emmerich's White House Down.

Featuring a pricey script($3M!) by James Vanderbilt, the film has Tatum starring as a Secret Service agent and family man called in to save the President when the White House is taken over by terrorist forces.  There's something of a race to the finish line to see which film can be completed first, as Relativity has essentially the same film getting made in Olympus Has Fallen, which has Gerard Butler starring and Antoine Fuqua directing.

Tatum's made plenty of brawny flicks in the past, but they were either franchises like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, or smaller aimed films like Fighting or The Eagle. With Sony putting some serious cash in backing White House Down, we're going to get our best look yet at Tatum's viability on his own.  He couldn't have picked a better director to do it with, as Emmerich(Independence Day) very rarely makes a box office dud. [THR]