When you make a movie as big as Independence Day: Resurgence, there's bound to be things that don't wind up in the movie. If anything, more stuff gets left off on the table in pursuit of these massive blockbusters than it does any other arena of filmmaking. That's because filmmakers have to come up with countless ideas and propositions and experiments to figure out what's actually going to work in their movie.

The stuff that doesn't end up in the movie isn't worthless, though. It's not lost to the ravages of time. In the case of Roland Emmerich's latest movie, you can find a lot of it in Titan Books' latest coffee table triumph, The Art & Making of Independence Day: Resurgence.

Both the iconic 1996 film and its new sequel are covered extensively in its glossy pages, but it's some of the extra details provided about Resurgence that bring us here today. The book supplements a lot of information the movie just didn't have time to explain, but it also shows us how they arrived at a lot of the decisions that are in the movie. Regardless if you love the end result or not, it's interesting to track the development process this way, especially when it raises some interesting questions or observations. We've picked some of our favorites below.

Warning: Contains some spoilers for Independence Day: Resurgence.

Did Roland Emmerich break the moon in half then take it out of the movie?

Considering two different spaceships crash into it, the moon doesn't fair very well in Resurgence, but apparently things were originally way more catastrophic. All we see happen in the movie is the mothership skims across the surface of the moon, destroying the base there and sucking up all kinds of debris (and our hero's spaceship) into its gravity vortex on its way down to Earth. There's a section in the book devoted to the mechanics of this whole gravity vortex thing and it starts off by painting a very different picture of its arrival by referencing "how it cracks the moon in half."

Uh, it did? That certainly seems to have been the intention considering the quote goes on to reference how it was meant to make audiences fear that the Earth was about to crack in half as well. Maybe Emmerich realized that people could swallow some city sucking-and-dumping destruction, but not the moon literally being cracked in half. That's kind of a big deal, even for a Roland Emmerich movie.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Emmerich liked the early pre-vis of the moon destruction so much that he decided to cut it out of Resurgence and make a whole other movie about it.

By the way, what is Emmerich's next movie? Oh, it's called Moonfall? And it's about the moon falling to Earth? What a weird coincidence.

Austin, TX got demolished

The geography of the movie starts to get pretty jumbled once massive things start happening. Some of it is a bit more self explanatory, like Dubai getting dumped onto Paris, but other places are a bit more nondescript. For example, we never explicitly learn where Judd Hirsch's character is boating around when he gets caught up in a tsunami, but apparently it's Galveston, TX. It was originally supposed to be Miami, but that got changed for some reason. Whatever the case, the tsunami wave was apparently so massive that it destroyed Austin, TX, as seen in the bottom portions of the above concept art.

If you were wondering, the distance between Austin and Galveston is about 220 miles. That means the tsunami from just one leg of the mothership crashing into the Gulf of Mexico would have killed millions and millions of people as it swept all across the Gulf coast.

The mothership's swamp explained

One of the coolest parts of Resurgence is when the pilots assaulting the mothership crash inside and end up exploring it on foot. Suddenly they're in a swamp with big plants and giant machines and the movie does nothing to explain what's going on. That's not really a problem, either. It's actually cool that the movie doesn't stop to try and explain every single detail and design of the alien species. If you're curious, though, the art book does have plenty of answers.

Apparently the mothership is basically like a self-sustaining planet. The swamp area is where they grow their food, which then gets harvested by giant comb-like machines. It may not be a mindblowing detail, but it certainly makes us wish we'd been able to explore more of the ship's ecosystem. There's plenty of other concept art in the book showcasing proposed areas of the ships and ways to show off its scale, there just wasn't time (or a good way) to fit all of that into the movie.

The original aliens weren't warriors

If you're wondering why the aliens look a little different this time around, it's not just because Emmerich and friends decided to arbitrarily change the design. It's also not because the aliens have evolved in the last 20 years. It's because the aliens in Resurgence are a completely different class. Apparently these aliens are so cocky and thought Earth was so puny, the first time around they only sent their colonists, which included fighter jets but no soldiers. The mothership, however, is equipped with soldiers.

There are a number of different designs for these weaponized aliens in the book. You can check them out above and below.

The queen was almost a cowboy

We never saw a queen alien in the first Independence Day because it was destroyed without anyone even knowing it was aboard the orbital mothership. Or, maybe, no one thought to include it in the first place. Either way, it was created for the sequel as a means to give audiences one last big action hurrah. As you can imagine, designing this giant beast isn't quite as simple as taking one of the other aliens and just rendering them larger. It had to be a whole new design, and things got very insectoid very quickly.

One funny thing about the queen is its weaponized suit original had two guns that would get drawn out from holsters, but Emmerich nixed it for making her look too much like a gunslinging cowboy. So instead they went, as Emmerich often does, bigger and gave her just a single gun that was the size of a skyscraper.

We also never get a full, head to "toe" look at the queen when she's out of the suit.

Also at one point there was an idea of having the humans meet the queen on the ship. That got abandoned, but we still have some art with tiny humans in the corner for scale.

Those are just a few sample topics and images from the book. It's actually 176 pages long, so if this kind of film geekery interests you, grab a copy of The Art & Making of Independence Day: Resurgence now.