By After an extended period of will-they-or-won’t-they, it looks like they’ve finally made a decision. 20th Century Fox has finally given the Independence Day sequel the green light!
As of right now, there’s nobody officially attached to the film. Jeff Goldblum has said that he’s been in talk with the original producer, Dean Devlin, and the original director, Roland Emmerich, Emmerich and Devlin themselves are hoping to land a spot on the production, with Devlin all-but-confirmed to reprise his role as producer. It’ll be interesting to see the box office numbers for this film. When it releases, it’ll be almost 20 years to the day since the first one hit the theater. The first opened to $50 million and had a $306 million run, so the sequel will definitely face an uphill battle.
Independence Day 2 is the latest film in an odd trend of sequels releasing quite a while after the original. Earlier this year, Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill, the follow-up to the 2004 hit Sin City, was finally released. It didn’t fare well at the box office. In fact, the entire run of A Dame to Kill didn’t even gross half of what the original made on its opening weekend. Dumb and Dumber‘s sequel, Dumb and Dumber To, also released this year, just short of twenty years after the original. It doubled the numbers set by the original’s opening weekend ($16 million to $36 million), but as of this writing, its lifetime gross is at $72 million, which isn’t nearly as impressive as the original’s lifetime run, which managed to net $172 million.
Will the next generation welcome a sequel to Independence Day with open arms? We’ll find out when Independence Day 2: Freedom Harder (it’s just a suggested subtitle – feel free to use it, 20th Century Fox) opens on June 24th, 2016.
[via Collider]