Independence Day 2 and 3 are already slated to be made, but the role of Will Smith has raised much speculation since he was the central hero of the original 1996 blockbuster movie that generated $811 million at the box offices. Producer Dean Devlin sat down to explain why exactly Smith will not be coming back for the Independence Day sequel and what we might expect from the story.
In a related report by the Inquisitr , the Independence Day 2 release date has reportedly been bumped slightly from the expected July time frame. Director Roland Emmerich also explained the basic Independence Day plot by summarizing where events stand.
“The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back, and they know that the only way you can really travel in space is through wormholes. So for the aliens, it could take two or three weeks, but for us that’s 20 or 25 years.”
Originally, Devlin and Emmerich had high hopes of immediately starting work on Independence Day 3 based upon the assumption that Independence Day 2 would do just as well at the box office. In the end, they decided it was better to play it safe since it’s been so long since the original movie came out and Will Smith is missing in action.
“We decided just to do one [sequel] first to make sure that people like where we’re going,” Devlin said. “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.”
Will Smith starred as Captain Steve Hiller and presumably that character should play a major role in the new story. It would also make sense since 20 years has passed both in real life and within the constraints of the plot. According to Devlin, Smith did discuss joining the Independence Day 2 cast but eventually turned them down.
“I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it,” Devlin said according to Nerd Report . “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.”
Do you think the lack of Will Smith could potentially break the Independence Day 2 movie?