Now that we know that the Independence Day sequel is moving forward , two questions have come up for fans: What happened to the previously announced ID4 Part 3? And where’s Will Smith?!

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Producer Dean Devlin, who along with director Roland Emmerich is responsible for both the original film and the upcoming sequel, recently addressed both topics while chatting with Nerd Report “We decided just to do one [sequel] first to make sure that people like where we’re going,” Devlin said. “If that works well, there’s an ability to do some world building which would be really fun and interesting to do. I think Roland and everybody felt, let’s just make sure 20 years later that people still are interested. I think in our case, we started to feel that maybe we were being a little bit arrogant by assuming that we could do two movies. We said you know what, let’s scale it down. Let’s first make sure that it works for everyone.”As for Smith, who helped save the world in the original film (with Jeff Goldblum!), Devlin admits that while he doesn’t know why the star passed on the sequel, he did meet with the filmmakers about the project.“I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it,” he says. “You’d have to ask him. I think he was just at a place where he did seriously consider it. We had a lot of meetings with him, but at the end of the day he decided that doing this wasn’t right for him.”And by the way, it looks like ID4 Part 2 (or Independence Day Forever or whatever it winds up being called) will impact Devlin and Emmerich’s planned Stargate revival. That film will now have to wait for the ID4 sequel to be completed, according to the producer, since Emmerich wants to direct the new Stargate as well.

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