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?
