After years of it sitting in development hell, Fox finally greenlit an Independence Day sequel last month, which for the moment bears the terrible title of ID Forever (ID4Eva!). You’ll notice I said “an Independence Day sequel” and not “the Independence Day sequels”, although there was originally talk about them shooting not just one, but two movies back-to-back. But in an interview with Nuke the Fridge (via the Nerd Repor) regarding his new TV show The Librarians, producer Dean Devlin gave a comment or two on this newly singular Independence Day sequel.
Firstly he confirmed that original director Roland Emmerich is indeed back at the helm and that star Will Smith is definitely not returning.
“Roland is back to direct. He developed a new script with a couple young writers and the new script is fantastic. We’re very excited about shooting.”
“I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it. You’d have to ask him. I think he was just at a place where he did seriously consider it. We had a lot of meetings with him, but at the end of the day he decided that doing this wasn’t right for him.”
Most importantly though, he then also gave a decidedly sensible answer as to why they’re only filming one of the two sequels that were originally planned.
“We decided just to do one first to make sure that people like where we’re going. If that works well, there’s an ability to do some world building which would be really fun and interesting to do. I think Roland and everybody felt, let’s just make sure 20 years later that people still are interested. I think in our case, we started to feel that maybe we were being a little bit arrogant by assuming that we could do two movies. We said you know what, let’s scale it down. Let’s first make sure that it works for everyone.”
Send that answer to everyone trying to build a shared movie universes without actually having a successful first movie to hang it all on. I’m one of the few people who doesn’t really want a sequel to Independence Day, much like Blade Runner. For me too much time has passed, and fans of the originals will shred the sequels to pieces if they don’t live up to the nostalgia (see Prometheus; the stupid of those characters still burns.). However Devlin seems to realise that, which fills me with a bit more confidence that it’s a movie both he and Emmerich want to make as opposed to a studio cash grab.
Finally he dropped a tit-bit on the planned Stargate reboot, confirming that Emmerich is keen to revisit the franchise and to direct the first movie which is said to be a remake of the original movie. However he couldn’t confirm if Emmerich would direct the other two movies in the proposed new trilogy.
“Unfortunately, we have to wait until we finish Independence Day for that. Roland wants to direct that one too. Hopefully we go into that right afterwards. He’d like to direct the first one. I don’t know if he wants to do all three but he definitely would like to do the first one.”
I’m feeling a bit happier, how about you?
Last Updated: December 9, 2014
