There Will Now Be Only One New Independence Day Sequel.

As reported earlier this year director Roland Emmerich announced that there would be at least two Independence Day sequels, which would be straight follow-ups to his original 1996 blockbuster.

Now it appears that you’ll be lucky to get one sequel as FOX have greenlit the project and Emmerich has decided to only proceed with one sequel only, to test the waters and find out if there’s still an audience out there for a property which is nearly 20 years old.

Explaining why he took the decision to Nerd Report recently he had this to say:

We decided just to do one 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 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.

What is also clear is that Will Smith will not be returning to reprise his role as Capt Steven Hiller but instead Internet rumours have hinted that both Pill Pullman, who played President Thomas J. Whitmore in the first film and Jeff Goldblum, who played  computer expert David Levinson, could be returning.