Michael B. Jordan to join Will Smith in I Am Legend sequel
Didn't Will Smith's character die in the first one?
15 years later, after living through an apocalypse of our own (but with fewer zombie vampires), director Francis Lawrence’s 2007 movie I Am Legend is getting a sequel—and one with twice as much star-power as the first one. According to Deadline, original star Will Smith will be teaming up with Michael B. Jordan for a new I Am Legend, making this the first time the two of them have worked together on a movie.
We don’t know anything about the plot of the new movie, but this is the part where we have to address the giant zombie vampire in the room: Will Smith’s character, Robert Neville, dies at the end of the first movie. He kills himself so a pair of other humans can escape with a cure he has developed for zombie-vampirism, and the two of them go on to tell other survivors about the sacrifice he made as he becomes… a legend.
Buuuut, DVD owners will recall that I Am Legend had an alternate ending, one that more closely follows the Richard Matheson book that the movie (like The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man) was based on. In that ending, Will Smith’s character survives and realizes that the zombie vampires are more intelligent than he thought, so the fact that he’s killed so many makes him a monster in their eyes. In other words, he becomes… a different kind of legend. A bad one. Will Smith leaves New York City with the other survivors, leaving the door open for him to appear in a sequel.
The problem is that that’s not the canonical ending, unless maybe it is? Would anyone notice or care if Warner Bros. just used the alternate DVD ending? There have already been all of these horror movie reboots that ignore the sequels, and people seem to be okay with making sense of that in their heads. Hell, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker undid all of the good stuff in The Last Jedi, and those movies didn’t even come out 15 years apart.
A director and any other stars have yet to be attached to I Am Also Legend (that’s our title pitch), but Deadline does helpfully note that original screenwriter Akiva Goldsman will be writing and producing this new one. We’re only mentioning that down here so this news story can end on a downer like the theatrical cut of I Am Legend.