Independence Day, released in 1996, is a stone-cold classic of rollicking, big-budget, action-packed tentpole cinema. Part of a wave of disaster movies that swept the box office in the '90s, it finds a fleet of city-sized alien spaceships suddenly appearing over several locales around the world. As it turns out, they don't want to share a really excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or even to be taken to our leader. No, they intend to raze our planet and everything on it, and several destroyed cities and one miserably failed counterattack later, it falls to a select few unlikely heroes to find a way to take down the alien invaders and save the Earth.
The film's all-star cast included Will Smith as fighter pilot Steven Hiller; Jeff Goldblum as tech expert David Levinson; Randy Quaid as Russell Casse, a Vietnam vet whose crazy stories of alien abduction suddenly stop seeming so crazy; and Bill Pullman as President Thomas Whitmore, himself a former combat pilot, who rallies the human resistance by giving one of the single most stirring speeches in film history during Independence Day's third act.
In 2016, we got the belated sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, which brought back most of the original film's cast — but not Smith. Captain Hiller's off-screen death was explained as being the result of a test flight gone wrong, with his stepson Dylan (Jesse Usher) following in his wisecracking shoes. In an interview with Hey U Guys shortly before the flick's release, director Roland Emmerich chalked Smith's absence up to a creative decision. "The first script, which included Will Smith, was a totally different story," he said. "It was a father-son story. And when that didn't work, I said, 'Let's explore other possibilities'... I hired two young writers, and they said, 'This has to be the hand-off to a younger generation,' and that was actually... the real trick to [making the movie] work."
Source: Looper.com
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