Will Smith revealed some interesting details about the long-gestured I Am Legend follow-up during a recent appearance on the Drink Champs podcast. “What we were gonna do is the prequel,” Smith noted, before writer Akiva Goldsman suggested instead making a sequel using the 2007 film’s alternate ending — in which Smith’s character, Robert Neville, survives […]
Will Smith revealed some interesting details about the long-gestured I Am Legend follow-up during a recent appearance on the Drink Champs podcast.
“What we were gonna do is the prequel,” Smith noted, before writer Akiva Goldsman suggested instead making a sequel using the 2007 film’s alternate ending — in which Smith’s character, Robert Neville, survives — as a launching point.
“Michael B. Jordan‘s character currently is the head of a new settlement … in Connecticut,” Smith said. “He’s not my son.”
Test screening audiences responded poorly to the original ending, which was more faithful to Richard Matheson‘s 1954 novel on which the film was based.
“Six weeks before the movie comes out, we had to reshoot the ending that was actually in the movie where my character dies,” Smith explained. “We saved it, ’cause the audiences hated it. But it was what we originally wanted to do. It was probably an $8 million ending that got scrapped, ’cause there was special effects and all that stuff in it.”
I Am Legend went on to gross $585 million worldwide.
“This will start a few decades later than the first,” Goldsman previously said of the sequel. “We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film. What Matheson was talking about was that man’s time on the planet as the dominant species had come to an end. That’s a really interesting thing we’re going to get to explore. There will be a little more fidelity to the original text.”
Director Francis Lawrence is also on board for the follow-up.
