Fifteen years after Roland Emmerich and his now signature use of CGI blew up the White House, the occasionally rumored sequel to Independence Day appears to becoming a reality.
Emmerich and his old producing and screenwriting partner Dean Devlin are putting the final touches on back-to-back scripts for Independence Day sequels. The big question though is if Will Smith will be part of them.
A couple years back, Smith had demanded $50 million to shoot both movies, a hefty number that Fox balked at considering Emmerich’s own bulky salary and production costs. Nothing was settled and all parties decided to focus on other projects and revisit the Independence Day sequels at another date. That date appears to be approaching.
Fox is wary of the hard-line approach that Smith took recently with Sony in Men in Black III, whose production costs rocketed past $215 million, more than Men in Black II made domestically ($190 million).
Not much is known about the two sequels other than that they will tell a single story but, as Vulture reports, they "will be engineered more in the Back to the Future Parts 2 and 3 sequential-but-not-imperative model," rather than like the final Harry Potter or Twilight movies which are just one movie split in two.
Last year Emmerich revealed the back-to-back concept, with the titles for the movies being ID4-ever: Part I and Part II. Back then, Emmerich said that, "it’s an alternate reality kind of movie. Naturally alien technology has changed everything. Who WILL be President?" Emmerich emphasized, "WILL," hinting that Smith’s character would somehow become President.
While all parties continue to hash out the financial side of the production, do you think these sequels can be successful without Smith?
