Caffeinated Clint
The movie that is, not the holiday
It was full-speed ahead at one stage – and why not, a truckload of gold bullion was in order for them if they decided to do it – but Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich ultimately decided not to have Will Smith get up their and “Kick E.T’s ass” again in an “Independence Day” sequel.
“The sequel was written right after 9/11,” Devlin said in an with SciFi Wire. “It was actually inspired by 9/11. And you know, there’s a lot of good stuff in it, but it still didn’t feel right. [It] didn’t feel like the right thing to do. So at least at the moment, Roland and I have no intention of doing a sequel to Independence Day. I don’t know if the studio [Fox] will maintain that they don’t have an interest in doing it. They may change their mind. But I think it’s not a movie that should have a sequel.”
Devlin produced and Emmerich directed the megahit “Independence Day”, based on their script. After that, Devlin said, “We wrote a sequel, and we thought it was a pretty good script. But when we finished the script, and we looked at it, … we said, ‘Yeah, it’s good, but is it right?’ And what we meant by that was, the genesis of Independence Day was to not tell an alien-invasion story, but to tell a disaster movie using an alien invasion as the natural disaster. So after that we thought, ‘Can we think of a disaster movie that had a good sequel?’ And we couldn’t think of one. Because … what makes it so spectacular is it’s a once-in-a-lifetime disaster. So while there was a script that we felt worked, we didn’t think it was right. And so we actually gave the money back to 20th Century Fox that they paid us to write it. We said, ‘Look, we can’t take the money, because we don’t want to do it.’ And we explained our thinking on it, and, I got to say, to their credit, they agreed with us. And so they didn’t move forward with the sequel with someone else. Now, I don’t know if that’ll hold down the line, but at least today they agree with us: that it was never intended to have a sequel, and if we did it, it would just be for the money, and that’s not the right reason to do a sequel.”
