Back in 2007, I Am Legend – starring Will Smith – proved to be a huge hit after grossing over 5 million worldwide. That success obviously led to talk of a sequel, but for whatever reason, it just never happened (despite numerous reports to the contrary).
Co-writer and producer Akiva Goldsman recently sat down with io9 to talk about his upcoming adaptation of Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel, Winter’s Tale, and the subject of a follow-up to I Am Legend quickly came up. After quite clearly stating that there was “never” talk of an I Am Legend 2, he added:
“Oh no no, [there was] never a movie. I mean, we wrote a prequel [and] a sequel. We had a really interesting prequel, which was the first outbreak of the virus, during a Thanksgiving Day parade, which was awesome.
We did a really interesting prequel that [took place] later. Which was right after the first… really right when the population of humans became pretty decimated. And it was this sort of trek to Washington. Which included a dark seeker elephant that had broken out of the zoo.
Then we did a sequel, that started with Neville again — and you realized that he was cloned. We’ve tried every which way. In fact if you’re available you could be in the next movie. It will never happen but we really enjoyed trying to make it happen.”
It sounds as if they really did try to get another I Am Legend movie off the ground, but the studio just didn’t go for it for some reason. Critics praised the first movie for Will Smith’s performance, and the ideas above both sound as if they could have been very appealing to audiences.
Are you disappointed that they didn’t make I Am Legend 2? Which of the scripts would you have liked them to use? Let us know in the comment section below!
Throwing in a hokey clone plotline scenario for the sequel would have been jumping the shark imho. That’s a cheeseboat move by itself, given it moves the plot from “hard science fiction” genre to “science fantasy.” Cloning just doesn’t work the way that plot line seems to suggest, and to think such a feat could be accomplished in a post-scientific, scavenger apocalypse is a bit hard to swallow.
But more to the point, the movie distorted the original source material enough as it is. I Am Legend was never supposed to be about rebuilding human society. It was a gothic vehicle about the emergence of a completely new vampiric civilization arising form the ashes of the now extinct, and perhaps rightfully so, human society. The dramatic tone here was that Neville, who symbolizes humanity, had become the bad guy. Humanity was the regressive. Humanity was the one standing in the way of the nascent beginnings of something new and grand. Something as necessary as it was horrifying, at least in regards to the human perspective. This is why I Am Legend is gothic fiction and was never intended to be another brainless popcorn Hollywood action movie.