‘Independence Day 2’: Jeff Goldblum will return, script is ‘brewing’

A follow-up to the 1996 alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day, which starred Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, is long overdue.

“Well, people like that Jurassic Park thing, and I think they’re making another, which I tell them, I’ll be first in line for, but am not in,” Goldblum told TIME magazine in an interview posted on Tuesday, referring to that other hit franchise he’s famous for.

UPDATE: The release date has been moved up -get the details HERE

“And then Independence Day, I had a meeting and have been talking over the last several months or year with [Director] Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, the producer, and they’ve been cooking up and say they have a part for me in what they hope will be a plan to make another one pretty soon.”

He added, “They’re still talking about it and I’ve heard recent rumblings here and there about it, and ‘Oh, there’s a scripting coming in’—maybe last weekend there was a script handed in, so it’s brewing.”

E! summarized the long history of the sequel.

In 2011, Devlin confirmed to Collider in an on-camera interview that he and Emmerich hoped to make not one but two Independence Day sequels.

In 2013, Emmerich talked to The Los Angeles Times about the sequel plans, saying about Goldblum, “I think we’ll invite him back.”

Also that year, while promoting his movie White House Down (which features a scene that sort of pays homage to Independence Day), Emmerich told Entertainment Weekly that an Independence Day sequel would be made up of two parts, titled ID Forever Part I and ID Forever Part II, and that Smith is not confirmed to return. He told The New York Daily News that the actor would not be featured in the new movies “because he’s too expensive” and because “he’d also be too much of a marquee name.”

Deadline reported that following several screenplay rewrites, Carter Blanchard is set to write a new script for an Independence Day sequel, directed by Emmerich, and that the movie is set for release on July 1, 2016.