Director Roland Emmerich, king of big budget disaster films like Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, has revealed that he has some directorial regrets.
While on a press tour for his latest flick, a World War II film called Midway, Emmerich revealed that he wished he’d quit working on Independence Day: Resurgence before it made its way into cinemas.
Panned by critics and filmgoers alike, Emmerich said that he’d set out with the intention “to make a movie exactly like the first”, and now believes he “should have stopped” once Will Smith dropped out “in the middle of production” to film Suicide Squad.
A sequel to the 1996 box office hit, Liam Hemsworth stepped in to fill Smith’s shoes, but it still only made $389 million worldwide on a reported $165 million budget.
“I should have stopped making the movie because we had a much better script,” Emmerich said.
“I had to, really fast, cobble another script together. And I should have just said ‘no’, because all of a sudden I was making something I criticised myself, a sequel.”
Whether he regrets making “offensively bad” Stonewall, a film currently sitting at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes — compared to Resurgence’s 29% — is yet to be determined.
