“We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!”
This was the world premiere of Independence Day . To understand the tension at that premiere, you have to rewind six months. In early 1996, the industry was skeptical. Director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin had just made Stargate , a modest hit. But their follow-up was a disaster movie about a global alien invasion with a budget ballooning past $75 million—a colossal sum at the time. independence day 1996 premiere
Independence Day would go on to gross over $817 million worldwide. It made Will Smith the biggest star on the planet. It gave us the greatest Presidential speech never written by a real President. “We will not go quietly into the night