December 04, 2005
Independence Day 2 scrapped
This is a bizarre story indeed. After 9/11 Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the original creatives for Independence Day, wrote a sequel inspired by those events. They finished a script they liked and then handed back their advance and binned the idea...without a real reason why.
Cinematical have the story:
"We wrote a sequel, and we thought it was a pretty good script," Devlin told SciFiWire. "But when we finished the script, and we looked at it, ... we said, 'Yeah, it's good, but is it right?' ... 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." Devlin says it was at that moment that he and his partner took a meeting with the studio, who surprised the pair by agreeing that the sequel shouldn't happen. "Now, I don't know if that'll hold down the line," he says. "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."
I thought that was pretty impressive and surprising. Not only because they did it, I mean you wouldn't think it would be hard to bin a second ID movie, but that they had a good script, an advance, and probably a guaranteed revenue.
I wonder though, what would be the market for a movie like this in the current climate? Is that perhaps the real reason it was pulled?
Posted by at December 4, 2005 10:43 AM
Comments
Posted by: darren seeley at December 4, 2005 05:33 PM
Has there EVER been a reason for a film sequel other than money? Cos I'm damn sure Emmerich wouldn't have been making it for the sake of cinematic art.
Posted by: James Russell at December 5, 2005 01:25 AM
i speak for the majority of the world.
ID4 did not suck and anyone who thought it did has forgotten how to enjoy a movie without tearing it apart senselessly.
watching new york and LA get blown up violently was great. watching the alien fucks who did it get blown up even more violently rocked even more.
hearing that there is no sequel, however, is bittersweet.
i thought after the ships all crashed, there would be a HUGE story to tell with the technology we gain from the aliens' devices we could have recovered.... and the ground war with the surviving aliens in the saucers ( there would be billions of billions of them ) would have been pretty good too.
but i am slightly glad there is no sequel. id4 was one of my favorite movies and if they screwed up a sequel it WOULD water down the original.
hats off to them. i hope they continue making these popcorn flicks that i truely enjoy.
even eight legged (cough) freaks.... wait. did i say that out loud?
Posted by: mogulus at December 6, 2005 04:11 AM
Hard to say. The original rocked. It had it all: a love story, good vs. evil, David vs. Goliath, the coming together of humanity. The first third of ID4 was, I think, as good as anything ever committed to film. I agree that if the second one didn't live up to expectations (how could it) it would seem like it wasn't worth making (Speed 2, anyone?), but I still think it was worth a shot. If it didn't pan out, you still had the original. Plus, there really is so much story to tell. How do you rebuild the Earth? Does humanity go back to its old ways? How about the technology culled from the ships? Of course, Will Smith had said he didn't want do to the movie, so right there it was kind of an uh oh moment (like when Keanu said no to Speed 2). We'll see what happens in the future. Never say never.
Posted by: Joe at December 13, 2005 01:28 PM
ID4ever gone for good?
See, God DOES exist!