Devlin Talks Independence Day 2

The original plan from Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich for the Independence Day franchise was to film two more sequels back to back.  That has changed though.

Speaking to Nerd Report, Devlin explained, “We decided just to do one first to make sure that people like where we’re going. 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.”

In addition, Devlin explained why Will Smith won’t be returning for the new film.

“I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it. 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.”

“Independence Day 2″, which Emmerich will direct, is out July 4, 2016.