Last week 20th Century Fox finally gave the green light to the long-in-development sequel to 1994’s blocksbuster alien invasion flick Independence Day, although the announcement referred solely to Independence Day 2 and made no mention of the studio’s previous plans to produce two back-to-back follow-ups. So, what happened to ID Forever – Part 2? Well, speaking to Nerd Report, producer Dean Devlin has explained why there’s only going to be the one sequel, for the time being at least…

“We decided just to do one [sequel] first to make sure that people like where we’re going. If that works well, there’s an ability to do some world building which would be really fun and interesting to do. I think [director Roland Emmerich] 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.”

Devlin also went on to reveal that he and Emmerich did meet with Will Smith about a potential return for Independence Day 2, but Smith ultimately declined: “I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it. 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.”

Independence Day 2 is slated for release on June 24th 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UjZ2TF1kEjE&list=PL18yMRIfoszH_jfuJoo8HCG1-lGjvfH2F