I swear this story is true, last night, after seeing Roland Emmerich‘s White House Down, I went to the grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk. Said gallon can be seen to the right and as I’m sure you’ve already noticed, it expires on July 4.
Why this is so coincidental (or is it?) is because only hours earlier Fox announced they were moving forward with Indpendence Day 2, which Emmerich will once again direct. Eerie right?
The film will be a sequel to Emmerich’s 1996 movie Independence Day, which starred Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, which told a story involving aliens invading Earf, blowing up the White House and cigars.
Emmerich actually discussed the sequel back in March, telling EW it would not be just one film, but two, the titles being ID Forever Part 1 and ID Forever Part II. I guess my only hope there is they change it to ID4ever or like Mark Wahlberg in Fear, ID-4eva. You know, keep it gangsta.
In the EW article it read:
The films take place 20 years after the original, when a distress call sent by the first wave of aliens finally brings reinforcements to Earth. “The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back,” explains the director, who completed two scripts with Independence Day co-writer Dean Devlin and has given them to White House Down writer-producer James Vanderbilt for a rewrite. “And they know that the only way you can really travel in space is through wormholes. So for the aliens, it could take two or three weeks, but for us that’s 20 or 25 years.”
[S]torylines will focus on a new generation of human heroes, including the stepson of Will Smith’s Independence Day character (played in that film by Ross Bagley). “It’s still some of the same characters, but also new younger characters; it’s a little bit like the sons take over,” says Emmerich, who promises that the first sequel will have a cliffhanger ending to keep audiences coming back for more. “The first one ends on a little success, but only enough to give the humans hope. And then in the second one they free themselves again [from the aliens].”
Bill Pullman spoke with Crave earlier this year promoting his now-canceled NBC television show “1600 Penn” saying, “Within a year, yeah, something like that I guess… I worried about taking this part because it’s heating up. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I should do the comedy’ and I talked to Dean [Devlin] and Roland [Emmerich] and they said, ‘No, do it. We’ll work around it. If it goes, we’ll work around it.'” I guess, lucky for everyone, the show is canceled and Pullman is free whenever he’s needed.
Pullman also alluded to there being two films saying, “I like what I have to do in both of them. I’m not in an old age home in a wheelchair being wheeled out for one more moment. It’s a very interesting conception of what happens to Whitmore between then and when it picks back up.”
Will Smith’s involvement seems unlikely and Goldblum’s return is also a question mark.
The film is set for a July 3, 2015 release. I’ll probably have bought a lot more milk by then, more on that as the story develops.
