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Soundwave on 23 June 2016
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Lawlight said:
Soundwave said:

I probably would've signed Will Smith for the movies and scaled back some of the CGI budget and marketing.

He would've added $50-$100+ million in the film's international gross fairly easily and increased home video sales by probably the same amount.

In the end as the studio you end up walking out with more money in your pocket. 

Like After Earth?

After Earth is not associated with Will Smith like ID4 is. Indepedence Day basically made Will Smith the biggest movie star on the planet for a while, quite frankly he was a good fit for that role too, heroic, yet funny and cool. 

It's not crazy to say ID4-2 would make more money with Will Smith than without him. It's a film people associate with him. 

So yeah sure, I'd ID4-2 might make say $500 million worldwide as is, but with Will Smith maybe that number goes up to $600 million instead, and then you have a corresponding bump in home video revenue too.

It sounds like the real bottom line here is that Will Smith simply did not want to do the sequels, he wanted to do Suicide Squad instead. Most likely the studio would've pushed out the $$$ to have him back.