Trivia / Independence Day: Resurgence

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• Actor Leaves, Character Dies: Steven Hiller was Killed Offscreen shortly before Resurgence, since Will Smith didn't want another science-fiction father-son story after After Earth.
• Backed by the Pentagon: Unlike the first film, which was this trope until Emmerich put Area 51 in the film, Resurgence was sponsored by the US military to hell and back, including in the marketing. The US Army ran their own ad campaign congruous to the film and used it extensively for recruiting purposes.
• California Doubling: Most of the film was shot in New Mexico. And again Utah's Salt Flats are supposed to be near Area 51 in Nevada.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub, Jake Morrison is voiced by Tatsuya Fujiwara, aka Shuya Nanahara.
• Creator Backlash: In November 2019, Roland Emmerich admitted in an interview that he "regrets" not cancelling development on the film after Will Smith dropped out.
• Creator Killer: This movie's critical and box-office failure ensured that it would be the last film that Roland Emmerich made for a Hollywood studio. Both of his subsequent films were financed independently.
• Dueling Movies: With Star Trek Beyond, which was released a couple of weeks after this film. While Beyond was definitely better-received, this film actually did better financially, having a slightly smaller budget and making slightly more money worldwide — Beyond did make a little more money domestically, but neither film did particularly well in that regard.
• Franchise Killer: This remains to be seen, though producer Dean Devlin confided in a March 2018 interview that he currently has no plans for the long-rumored third film in the series and the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox makes it even less certain. Roland Emmerich still said that Disney's pechant for franchises could open the possibility for a third movie.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Most of the shots in the first trailer (such as every shot on the moon) were either heavily altered in the final film or are replaced with alternate takes.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Mae Whitman and Ross Bagley are replaced with Maika Monroe and Jessie T. Usher as the President's daughter Patricia and Steven and Jasmine's son Dylan respectively. No explanation was given for the change.
    • Out-of-universe, recasting Dylan is understandable given that Ross Bagley hadn't acted in more than a decade before this film came out, but recasting Patricia is a headscratcher as Mae Whitman is a popular and successful actress with quite a bit of name recognition, leading to a lot of speculation that Patricia was recast purely for sex appeal (speculation that Whitman herself, if her retweets are any indication, seems to agree with).
  • In the European French dub, Vincent Violette replaced Robert Guilmard as Thomas J. Whitmore.
  • In the Japanese dub, Motomu Kiyokawa replaced the late Ichirō Nagai as the dub voice of Julius Levinson.
  • In the Spanish dub, Joan Massotkleiner replaced the late Jesús Nieto as Julius, Toni Avilés replaced Carolina Montijano as Jasmine Hiller, Joan Pera replaced Luis Varela as Dr. Okun, and Xadi Mouslemeni replaced Juan Antonio Castro as Dr. Isaacs.
  • In the Brazilian Portuguese dub, Hélio Ribeiro replaced Luiz Feier Motta as Whitmore, probably owing to how he became Bill Pullman's usual dubber.
• Playing Against Type: It's the first megabudget film Charlotte Gainsbourg has ever played in. Up to that point she only played in auteurist dramas and the like, most famously the films of Lars von Trier.
• Posthumous Credit: The film was released shortly after Robert Loggia's (General Grey) death in 2015, and the film is dedicated to him.
• Saved from Development Hell: Plans for a sequel of the original movie have been in talks since the first movie became a smash hit back in 1996, but only in the early 2010s did the director came with an idea on how to continue the story.
• Sequel Gap: 20 years. Roland Emmerich even noted it by saying that during the interim mankind would have rebuilt all the destroyed cities, and Time Dilation would allow the aliens to travel across the galaxy.
• Star-Derailing Role: For Maika Monroe, whose hype from It Follows and The Guest quickly fizzled thanks not only to the film's failure, but the controversy surrounding her replacing Mae Whitman as Patricia. Afterwards, she went back to horror, independent films, and supporting roles, and while she's continued to win acclaim as a scream queen, she hasn't starred in any major studio films since.
• Troubled Production: Nowhere as conflicted as the trope usually entails, but at one point, the production had to be shut down for a week due to the budget running out, with actors and crew essentially on standby until the studio refunded it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original plan was that were going to be two sequels released with a year of difference, but in the end the studio only greenlit one movie.
  • One early story for the film was quite different than what ended up on screen: According to an interview with Empire Magazine, it had humanity accidentally shoot down another alien ship, only to have the aliens land on the White House Lawn at the end of the film and say that they came in peace, which was supposedly the big theme of the film. Given how the sphere is introduced in the film, at least a germ of that idea remained.
  • The Monumental Damage sequence involving Singapore and London was written as Dubai and Paris. The latter was changed following the November 2015 attacks. Also the Taj Mahal was planned to be featured in the film as another monumental victim only to be axed by the Indian government due to fears of protests of having Indian monuments destroyed.
  • The movie was expected to be the first of three planned follow-up films that would continue the story from the original. Sadly, the movie was slammed by critics for being an elaborate but ultimately empty spectacle, and its lackluster receipts didn't indicate much audience interest in the movie or its potential sequels. According to Emmerich, he and the studio are at least considering turning to the small screen to carry out the next adventure.

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