Twentieth Century Fox announced on June 20 that the sequel to Independence Day will finally come to U.S. theaters on July 3, 2015.

Director Roland Emmerich will return for the sequel but the movie's lead character will not.

"Will Smith can not come back because he's too expensive, but he'd also be too much of a marquee name," Emmerich told The New York Daily News in an interview on June 22. "It would be too much."

Independence Day, which was released in 1996, is considered the movie that helped Smith become a Hollywood A-lister. It also grossed $817.4 million.

Emmerich did confirm, however, that half of the original crew will be a part of the sequel as well as new faces. Despite Smith's absence from the sequel, Independence Day co-screenwriter Dean Devlin had previously explained why he feels the movie won't be a disappointment.

"The good news for us is we never seem to run out of villains," he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. "Every day we open the newspaper and are like, 'Wow, there's another guy we'd love to take down.' So I think as long as the world keeps providing us with privileged people who take advantage of those who are powerless, I think we won't run out of stories."

He also explained why the movie will hit the big screen 19 years after the original.

"We resisted doing the sequel for years because we still wanted to honor the first one. The first one gave us all careers, and we really love that movie and loved the experience," Devlin said.

"I think it took a long time, but I feel like we finally got something that really feels like, 'that's worth seeing as a sequel to Independence Day.' "

The sequel is reportedly the first of a two part story and will be called ID Forever, Part 1. Other films that will be released that summer are Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Jurassic Park 4 and Marvel's The Avengers 2.

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