Roland Emmerich Unveils Independence Day Sequels

There’s just something about the idea of the world being ripped to pieces that gets the box-office bees buzzing, no matter how exhausted the story arcs may be. Roland Emmerich doesn’t give cinema anything new with his latest disaster flick, 2012, and he plans to keep that trend alive as he looks to make a couple more sequels to his 1996 blockbuster, Independence Day.

Independence Day is arguably Emmerich’s masterpiece that he’s since been unable to top, much of this due to Will Smith breakout role in his first scuffle with the alien race. If you don’t quite remember, he did pretty well against them, winning a treacherous air combat dog-fight against an invading alien ship, which ended with Smith greeting the foreign being with, “Welcome to Earth,” followed by a swift punch to its alien face.

The director plans to pick up right where the original left off some 13 years ago. “What we want to do in the next – it’s actually two movies – we want to do a bigger arc,” Emmerich told MTV in an interview. “‘Independence Day’ was always like the king who leads his troops into battle against an evil force, and that stays like that.”

This means Smith will definitely be involved in the followups, which the director said could be titled ID4-ever, parts I and II. Emmerich didn’t give so much as a ball-park release date for the trilogy, other than the promise that “one day we will do it and that the story will stay firmly on the planet. It’s always about earth and that earth gets invaded.”

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