In just a short time we’ll be getting our first look at Roland Emmerich‘s return to his least favorite place on Earth: The White House. The director blew up the iconic building in Independence Day and is set to have it invaded with White House Down (even reportedly including a meta reference to the former film in the latter). But before we get to that, we’ve got details on the long-in-development sequels for the Will Smith-led 1996 sci-fi blockbuster.
Speaking with EW, he let loose that he and producer Dean Devlin have finished up their work on two scripts for the films titled ID Forever Part 1 and ID Forever Part II and have now handed rewrite duties over to James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man). Getting to the story, which takes place 20 years after the original, he says, “The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back. 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….It’s a changed world. It’s like parallel history. [Humans] have harnessed all this alien technology. We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically-grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane.”
It sounds like the kind of fun, high-concept scenario Emmerich excels at and the director also dropped some spoilers for the films, which has Bill Pullman returning, but no word on Smith yet. He says it will be the stepson of Smith’s character that will lead (originally played by Ross Bagley), adding, “It’s still some of the same characters, but also new younger characters; it’s a little bit like the sons take over.” Getting to the spoilers, the director says, “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].” In the end, I suppose we can all guess how an Emmerich blockbuster will carry out, but he’s certainly not holding back when it comes to the structure. Since these films have been rumored for years, we’re not holding our breath for them come together, but if White House Down is a massive success, perhaps we’ll see them sooner rather than later.
Would you like to see ID4 sequels? What do you think about the plot?