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Roland Emmerich Gives Brief, Bleak Updates on 'ID2' & 'Foundation'

by Alex Billington
February 14, 2011
Source: Empire

Though we've still got seven months left until Roland Emmerich's epic story of the "origin" of Shakespeare, Anonymous, hits theaters in late September, there are a few other projects the German megamind should be spending his time on. One of which is Independence Day 2 (and 3), that last we heard about a year ago in a report claiming that two back-to-back sequels might be coming soon, but it was dependent on Will Smith, who went on to shoot Men in Black 3 this year. Well, Empire caught up with Emmerich and got new updates on ID2 as well as the Foundation series he's adapting and neither one are doing too good at the moment.

Let's start with the bad news. "Independence Day 2 is nowhere," Emmerich told them. "It's back and forth, back and forth. There's no script because I don’t want to write anything before anything starts." You might remember that Emmerich likes to sell package deals with every little detail in place, and I'm sure he's trying to setup something huge with ID2 & 3 but is just struggling to pull all the pieces together. Well that sucks. So how about the good news? Well, there's not much, but Emmerich does also talk about Foundation, his epic adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation sci-fi series. Its been in development for a while and still is:

"We've hired a production designer and it's mainly now to find out what the movie will cost. It'll take us until the end of March, then we'll decide. The studio's happy with the script, but now's the time that the numbers count. I want to make a movie that's very different from other science-fiction movies and I don't want to have the burden of too big a budget."

Not much progress. Although this is Roland Day-After-Tomorrow-10000BC-2012 Emmerich we're talking about, I was interested in seeing his take on the Foundation series, just because I love vast, epic sci-fi like that and I know he'd deliver with the visuals. It seems a bit odd that he's saying he doesn't want a big budget but wants to make something "very different" than anything we've ever seen. Can he pull that off without a big budget? We'll see. Emmerich does say about Independence Day 2 that, "one day it will happen" so it may be July 4, 2014 or 2016 or even 2020 before we see Big Willy back on screen kickin' extraterrestrial ass in an ID sequel - so at least it's coming! In the meantime, with his other "secret" project The Zone also dead and Foundation flustering, we're not really sure what Emmerich is up to next. We'll have to wait and see...

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