Will Smith Won't Return For 'Independence Day' Sequel

A very large part of the $800M Roland Emmerich's Independence Day brought in was on the shoulders of Will Smith, who was just becoming the superstar he would turn out to be. As Emmerich has been chatting up a sequel for the last couple of years, Smith has been non-committal on whether he would suit up for another go 'round. 20th Century Fox finally made the film official earlier this week by dating it for 2015, with no mention of Smith. As Emmerich makes the rounds to hype White House Down, he talked to the New York Daily News about who would be a part of the Independence Day 2 cast, and more importantly, who wouldn't be...

Emmerich: "Will Smith can not come back because he’s too expensive, but he’d also be too much of a marquee name. It would be too much. We have like maybe half of the people that you know would know from the first film and the other half people who are new."

This sounds like rear-end covering, actually, because it makes no sense that the studio would turn down having Smith as part of a summer blockbuster. More likely that Smith turned it down to pursue other projects. The last film was seventeen years ago when his career was in a completely different place. As for those "people that you know", Jeff Goldblum has talked about returning in the past, and it wouldn't be surprising if Bill Pullman did, as well.

Emmerich's plan to make this a two-part story titled ID Forever Part 1 and ID Forever Part 2 seems to be in place, and he went on to say they're "not doing a total reboot", but something he calls "totally unusual", whatever that means. James Vanderbilt, who penned White House Down and The Amazing Spider-Man, is currently rewriting Emmerich's script, so maybe that's where the "unusual" stuff will come in.

It's quite a gamble planning for two movies with the resiliency of Independence Day very much in question. One has to believe that an A-lister, or someone on the verge of it, will come aboard to help justify the prominent July 3rd 2015 release date.