You would have thought that with the incredible success of Independence Day that there would have been at least one sequel by now, but there’s only recently been any serious talk of one.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, the producing / directing team behind ID4, said the reason they haven’t considered a sequel until now is that they finally came up with a story worthy of a follow up.
Being that we’re also in an age of trilogies, the plan is to make two sequels back to back, ID Forever Parts One and Two. But one of the big questions for the ID4 sequel, one of the most important to consider, is whether Will Smith will come back or not. Still, Devlin and Emmerich spoke about the proposed sequels recently at the Hero Complex film festival in L.A., which screened ID4, and Devlin told the L.A. Times and Giant Freakin Robot that “things have to align…the planets have to get together.”
“Roland and I would really like to do one,” Devlin added. “We have some pretty darn good ideas on how to do one and, hopefully, that will all come together.”
Jeff Goldblum was also in on the screening, and Emmerich said, “I think we’ll invite him back.” This would definitely be cool because Goldblum’s been in quite a few great genre films, including the remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Fly. (It looks pretty good that Bill Pullman should be back for an ID4 sequel as well.)
It’s interesting to note that the sequel to ID4 will deal with wormholes, and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming sci-fi film Interstellar deals with them as well. The ID4 sequel will take place twenty years after the first movie. The aliens will return to earth, seeking vengeance against humanity, and they will come back through a wormhole, which takes them seconds, but it will be twenty years in our time.
So again, much like the proposed Gremlins reboot, you wonder how much of an audience ID4 will have if the sequels finally get off the ground. It’s coming up on twenty years that ID4 first came out, it will probably be past that point by the time a sequel is up and running, and you wonder if today’s generation will come out for the film, or if there will be any nostalgia left for the original.
Some sequels can take their time and the audiences will be there, Aliens comes to mind, but will they be there after twenty years? Again, as Devlin said, the planets will have to align for this one, and there’s a lot of elements that will have to be in place for an ID4 sequel to fly, so we’ll just have to wait and see on this one.
