In the real world, Will Smith will not appear in Independence Day: Resurgence because he was too expensive for Roland Emmerich. But you can’t just write that in a script, so the filmmakers had to come up with an in-universe explanation for Smith’s absence, which they revealed on the film’s tie-in site, Warof1996.com. [Spoilers, if that’s what you want to call them, will follow.] As it turns out, the reason Smith’s Captain Steven Hiller will not appear in the film is because … he’s dead! According to the site, Hiller died on April 27, 2007, when the new alien-hybrid aircraft he was flying suffered an “unknown malfunction†and crashed. That’s a cold write-around, Independence Day writers. Very cold. (Unless, of course, this is all a cover to make a potential Will Smith cameo in the film that much more surprising — which would be cold and calculating in a different way!)