Independence Day it is one of the most successful science fiction and action films of the nineties: it was the highest global gross of 1996 with almost 820 million dollars grossed worldwide and still remains a very popular cult today.
The film, directed by Roland Emmerich, tells of an imaginary and almost successful alien invasion of Earth and stars Will Smith as Captain Steven "Steve" Hiller, Jeff Goldblum as telecommunications and information systems specialist David Levinson, Bill Pullman as president Thomas J. Whitmore. Just the latter revealed how the title of the film was originally thought of another way and how it came to what we all know, Independence Day.
The title, from what the actor recalls, was originally supposed to be Doomsday, which in English means "doomsday" but it was thanks to the famous and exciting speech delivered by its President "Today we are fighting for the survival of the human race, today is the day when humanity said with a single cry 'We will not go away in silence in the night!'. Today we celebrate our Independence Day!“, Which the producers changed their minds and chose Independence Day as the title.
Here are the words of the actor:
"We shot that scene at night, of course, because it was dark. It was very late even though we had actually started shooting before the appointed time because right at that moment Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were in cahoots with Fox for the title of the film. If I'm not mistaken it had to be 'Doomsday'. It was what Fox wanted, a typical title for a disaster movie at the time. But [Devlin and Emmerich] really wanted it to be called 'Independence Day', so we had to do the speech scene flawlessly. After editing the footage, a couple of nights later, Dean came up to me and asked if I wanted to see her. He put on the VHS and showed me the piece of the speech, to which I said: Oh my God, they absolutely have to call this film Independence Day, and so they did in fact ”.
Source: Comicbook
Article Independence Day, Bill Pullman reveals what the title was supposed to be in the beginning and why it changed From We of the 80-90s.
