Independence Day 2 Premiere Date and Latest News: Will Smith not set to Reprise His Role, Are Movie-Goers Ready for yet Another Alien/Apocalyptic Film?

By Kara Michelle Aug 28, 2014 06:49 AM EDT

Independence Day 2 Premiere Date and Latest News: Will Smith not set to Reprise His Role, Are Movie-Goers Ready for yet Another Alien/Apocalyptic Film?

After 17 years since the release of the first Independence Day film, Fox has at long last set a premiere date for its upcoming sequel: on the Fourth of July holiday in 2015 (when else?). According to latest news, the movie will pick up some twenty years after the first film, though both co-writers Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin confirmed that Independence Day 2 will take place in "an alternate reality," in which humanity has spent the last two decades exploring much about the alien technology first seen in the prequel.

As expected, Independence Day 2 will be bringing back characters from the first movie, including former US president Thomas J. Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman) as well as MIT graduate-now cable repairman Dave Levinson (Jeff Goldblum). However, in spite of some recurring characters, it seems like Will Smith will not be returning for his role as Captain Steven Hiller. The movie shall also feature some new characters half of which should make up the cast.

Emmerich and Devlin had planned out the Independence Day sequel as a two - part narrative, under the working title ID Forever Part I & II. Emmerich had confirmed, however, that Fox decided to only do the first one for the time being, with James Vanderbilt (White House Down) set to fix the script.

That surely is understandable, considering that the blockbuster performance of the first film makes it somehow questionable whether the audience is actually looking forward to a new sequel after so many years. Also, with the number of alien films that had come out in recent years-many of which were not very successful-it is a wonder that the end-of-the-world sub-genre has not yet even felt overused and very much saturated at this point.