Will Smith to Return for INDEPENDENCE DAY 2?

In an interview posted on today's Digitalspy.com, INDEPENDENCE DAY 2 helmer Roland Emmerich shares that he's scheduled to have a meeting with original film star Will Smith about reprising his role in the sequel.

"I sometimes say no, Will Smith will not be in it because he didn't want to do it at first," explains the filmmaker. "Now we have a meeting planned, we want to talk about it again. Anything can happen."

Few details are known about the film's plot or cast, including which actors, if any, might return for the sequel. Emmerich confirmed that a number of the original film's characters do pop up in the script written by Dean Devlin and himself. The 1996 original also starred Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid, Mary McDonnell, Brent Spiner, James Duval and Vivica A. Fox.

The sequel is set for a release on July 3, 2015.

The original film's combined domestic and international box office gross is $816,969,268, which, at the time, was the second-highest worldwide gross of all time. It is currently the 38th-highest-grossing film of all time and was at the forefront of the large-scale disaster film and science fiction resurgences of the mid-to-late-1990s. It won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was also nominated for Best Sound Mixing.