Plot Details And Characters For 'Independence Day' Sequels Revealed; James Vanderbilt Doing Rewrites

In this summer's White House Down, director Roland Emmerich will once again wreak havoc on the President's pad. It's a place he knows well, having first blown it up 1996's Independence Day. Ever since that film was released, fans have discussed a sequel and in the past few months, Emmerich and his producer Dean Devlin have confirmed sequels are in the works: ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two.

Emmerich has now revealed the seed that the sequels will grow from, as well as the timeline and the main characters. The films take place about 20 years after the original film, and the world has been rebuilt. Twenty years, it seems, is about how long it takes for the aliens to respond to a distress call their destroyed friends sent out at the end of the first film.

He also revealed he and Devlin have completed two scripts and James Vanderbilt, the writer of The Amazing Spider-Man and White House Down, is currently doing the rewrites.

Entertainment Weekly reported on Emmerich's revelation:

The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back. And they know that the only way you can really travel in space is through wormholes. So for the aliens, it could take two or three weeks, but for us that's 20 or 25 years....It's a changed world. It's like parallel history. [Humans] have harnessed all this alien technology. We don't know how to duplicate it because it's organically-grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane.

The film will feature some faces from the first film (such as Bill Pullman) but the main characters will likely be a new generation, including Will Smith's stepson, now all grown up:

It's still some of the same characters, but also new younger characters; it's a little bit like the sons take over. The first one ends on a little success, but only enough to give the humans hope. And then in the second one they free themselves again [from the aliens].

He also said he's been working with art departments to figure out the look of the film. It sounds like the sequels are much further along than we had originally heard. Good news for fans of the original films.

Do you like the idea for these sequels?