Jeff Goldblum Says an 'Independence Day' Sequel Is in the Works

Will Smith and Goldblum saved our planet in 1996’s ‘Independence Day’

Will Smith bowed out earlier this year, but his one-time flight partner Jeff Goldblum says that he’s still on board for the long-awaited sequel to Independence Day.

The popular actor and recent light-bulb pitchman gave a quasi-update about a follow-up to the 1996 Roland Emmerich-directed sci-fi favorite, which plays endlessly on cable TV every summer.

"I had a meeting and have been talking over the last several months or year with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, the producer, and they’ve been cooking up and say they have a part for me in what they hope will be a plan to make another one pretty soon," Goldblum told TIME.com this week.

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It’s unclear how a sequel would work without Smith, who became a megastar after the original raked in $817 million in global box office. Also uncertain is how they can raise the stakes after saving the world in the first go-round. But no matter: the people have tweeted, and so it shall be done. The movie has already been given a tentative release date some time in July 2016 — one that seems wildly optimistic, given that Goldblum has described plans for a sequel as “nebulous.”

"They’re still talking about it, and I’ve heard recent rumblings here and there about it, and ‘Oh, there’s a scripting coming in,’" he says. "Maybe last weekend, there was a script handed in, so it’s brewing,"

Photo credit: Getty Images, 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection