Roland Emmerich Knew Independence Day Had To Beat Mars Attacks! To Theaters

Roland Emmerich's made a lot of disaster movies over the years, but "Independence Day" is still the best, probably because it had clear villains. Both "The Day After Tomorrow" and "2012" had their disasters be the fault of Mother Nature. That made for some great action sequences, but it also led to endings that just sort of fizzled out. In both the latter movies, the Earth's climate permanently changes and large swaths of humanity die, which makes their last-minute swerves towards happy, hopeful endings feel a little hollow.

In "Independence Day," meanwhile, the mass destruction is directly the result of a bunch of evil aliens trying to destroy all of humanity. These characters don't survive simply by weathering out the storm; they have someone to actively fight back against. It leads to a climactic, satisfying final battle where humanity comes together to fight against a common enemy. There are a lot of other things that make this Emmerich's best disaster movie — it's one of his tightest scripts, with some of his most memorable characters — but more than anything else it's the aliens that set the film apart.

The aliens were also, as it turns out, the thing that nearly killed the project before it started. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Emmerich explained: "I told our agent we wanted to do it, and he said forget about it, Tim Burton is doing 'Mars Attacks!' I said to [co-writer] Dean [Delvin], we can't do our film after a parody comes out."

For those who haven't seen it, "Mars Attacks!" is a parody of disaster movies. It's mainly focused on making fun of '50s alien-invasion movies like "The War of the Worlds," but when it came out in December of 1996, it almost felt like a parody of "Independence Day." That's impossible, of course — the script was written long before "Independence Day" hit theaters — but the similarities between the two films was certainly remarked upon by critics.

It's easy to see why Emmerich wouldn't want his movie to come out after "Mars Attacks!" The timing likely would've made the stakes of Emmerich's film feel more trivial. "Independence Day" is certainly a silly movie at times, but it still has genuine stakes and emotional moments that are supposed to hit the audience hard. If Burton's film came out right before it, would those emotional moments have landed as well as they did?

"We had to beat him to it," Emmerich recalled saying to his co-writer Dean Delvin at the time. "If it came out on the 4th of July weekend, we would beat Mars Attacks!, which was coming out in August." While "Mars Attacks!" would end up releasing a few months later than originally expected, Emmerich was able to stay on schedule. 

"We wrote the concept around the release date," Emmerich explained. Trying to get ahead of Burton led to the lucrative creative choice of turning the movie into what's basically a holiday film, which means the movie constantly pops back into the public consciousness every time another 4th of July comes along. Notably, Emmerich recalls Delvin telling him, "Let's just call it Independence Day; we can come up with something better later."