Talk of a sequel to the 1996 mega-hit Independence Day is one of those things we’ve ended up covering at least once a year, every year for the last several. Today is that day for 2012.

Dean Devlin, producer of the 90s blockbuster, is the one bending ears about the project this time around, and he explicitly states that he and Roland Emmerich are actively working on the project, the idea for which they feel like they’ve finally cracked.

“We resisted doing the sequel for years because we still wanted to honor the first one. The first one gave us all careers and we really love that movie and loved the experience. We didn’t want to make a movie because it was financially a good idea, we only wanted to do it when we had an idea and a concept that creatively felt like it honored the first one—that it felt like an organic sequel as opposed to ‘let’s just go make some more money.’ I feel like we got it. I think it took a long time, but I feel like we finally got something that really feels like, ‘that’s worth seeing as a sequel to Independence Day.'”

He explains that they’ll begin talking with the key players and working on getting something going but, as you might guess, that will likely be the hardest part of the process. If they can get folks like Smith, Goldblum, and Pullman back on board (with only the former being truly necessary), then I’d be willing to bet this thing gets made relatively soon, and as opposed to the reboot that will definitely happen one of these days if a sequel doesn’t.

Here’s the thing: I think it’s a great idea.

20 years seems like the right amount of time for the aliens to get their shit together and come back for more, and more than enough time for the world to have rebuilt, started to move on socially, and yet still been fundamentally altered by the events of 1996 tentpole. Just think… in Emmerich’s timeline, the alien invasion was essentially a global 9/11, so you could even weave in some shallow, just-interesting-enough social subtext in there!

With so many shitty alien invasion flicks happening it would be nice for Emmerich to take it back to what is –weirdly– now the old school (itself a rehash of the even older school). My only worry of course being that Emmerich’s filmmaking has more curdled than aged since the mid-90s, though pieces of 2012 and Anonymous suggest he could still make something great with a decent script.

It’s silly as shit, but with its reliance on character actors and genuinely cutting-edge effects (rather than marketable faces and volume of CGI) Independence Day is the right kind of dumb- the kind of dumb I wish Hollywood still knew how to make rather than the dumb they swing into theaters so often these days.

I hope when we hear about this project next year, it’ll be one step closer to happening.

Source | THR