Roland Emmerich plans Battle of Midway film & talks Independence Day sequel

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

It took twenty years, but Roland Emmerich's sequel to INDEPENDENCE DAY is just several months away. Although I'm a fan of the original film, I didn't expect to be as excited about INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE as I am, but with a brand new set of landmarks ready to be annihilated by bigger and more powerful aliens as well as Jeff Goldblum preparing to unleash another Apple virus, I've found that I'm actually quite looking forward to the sequel. During a Q&A which followed a recent screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY, Roland Emmerich revealed his post-INDEPENDENCE DAY plans by announcing that he's developing a Battle of Midway film.

At the time, the Americans were the underdog, it was one of those moments where, against all odds, people came together and did the impossible. A lot of pilots died in this battle. I want to make a monument to them and it would be great to make a movie about it.

Six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. code-breakers were able to determine the time and place of another attack by the Japanese Navy which enabled the U.S. Navy to prepare its own ambush and defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy over the course of a four day battle. Roland Emmerich certainly isn't a stranger to staging large scale battles, but he rarely does so without featuring aliens or monstrous tidal waves. At the same INDEPENDENCE DAY screening, Emmerich responded to a question asking why it took so long to get a sequel going.

I’m always against sequels and only when I can see another way how to make it not look like a sequel but a continuation of the 20 years, and that’s great when you have a whole new generation coming in and the whole world has changed. We had time to rebuild, and naturally what we do is rebuild all these landmarks exactly like they looked because humans are traditionalists when it comes to that. I said, ‘Okay, that’s cool,’ because now you have a whole new playing field.

Many of the original INDEPENDENCE DAY characters will be returning for the sequel, including Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, and Bill Pullman, but unfortunately Will Smith declined to return which led to the untimely demise of his character Captain Steven Hiller, which didn't exactly sit well with Smith. Emmerich said that he "told Will that his character dies in the film, and he was very upset. Will and I are still friendly. We kind of thought that he had to have a heroic death, and we don’t make a big thing out of it in the film because we don’t want to hold the movie down with that."

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE will destroy all the landmarks on July 24, 2016.