There’s been talk of a sequel to Independence Day for a while. Actually two sequels, ID Forever Part I and Part II.
It’s taken many years for the follow ups for one of the biggest blockbusters of the ‘90s to come together, but ID4 creators Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin claim they now have a story, or stories, worthy of a follow up.
Yet two big questions remain. Can Will Smith come back for the next two installments, and will the audiences be there when ID4 finally comes back to the big screen? It seems like yesterday I was waiting on line forever to see ID4, but it’s now seventeen years old if you can believe that, which is a long time to keep audiences waiting for a follow up.
Then again, we still have a lot of love for ID4, and if the new movies deliver as stand alone stories, perhaps ID4 can be reinvented for today’s audiences, and be nostalgia for the fans who saw it when it was first in theaters, like myself.
So now Roland Emmerich, who created and made ID4 with Dean Devlin, has given away a few details about the ID4 sequels to Entertainment Weekly. The sequels will happen twenty years after the events of the first film. “The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back,” Emmerich said. “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.”
The world has been rebuilt since the first invasion, “But [the aliens] also do different things,” Emmerich said. Bill Pullman has committed to come back, and one of the characters in the sequels will be Will Smith’s stepson, who apparently grows up to fight the aliens. “It’s still some of the same characters, but also new younger characters,” Emmerich continued. “It’s a little bit like the sons take over.” (The stepson could also be set up to take over if they can’t get Smith to come back).
Emmerich also promises the first sequel will end with a hell of a cliffhanger that will bring audiences back in droves, that’s if the ID4 sequels make it to the finish line. Again, we’ve been hearing about this for a while, much like the forever in development Ghostbusters 3, so we’ll definitely keep our eyes open for any new developments, but we’re also not holding our breath either.
