Will Smith is set for the most unlikely of returns Dr. Robert Neville in I Am Legend 2. Smith earned widespread praise for his performance as Neville in the original film, released in 2007, which centered on the character’s existence as the sole remaining human inhabitant of New York City.
In the first movie, Neville spends his days searching for a cure to the plague that has turned the vast majority of people into zombie-like creatures. Everything changes when he encounters Anna and a young boy named Ethan who, like him, are immune to the virus. What follows is a desperate attempt to get them to safety and also uncover the cure he subsequently discovers.
The film ends with Neville sacrificing himself so that Anna and Ethan, along with the cure he has discovered, can escape to safety.
A huge success on release with box office receipts of over $585 million putting it among the top 10 highest grossing films of the year, this being Hollywood, it was only a matter of time before talk of a sequel started.
There was just one hurdle to those plans though: the death of Smith’s character. It initially appeared as though the project might go down the prequel route.
In 2008, it was reported by Variety that Warner Bros. was planning a prequel with Smith reprising his role as Neville and Francis Lawrence returning to direct a script being penned by D.B. Weiss.
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By November of that year, however, Ain’t It Cool News was reporting that plans for a prequel had been scrapped in favor of a sequel. “Smith is actually the one who developed the initial story. It took place several years before the original film and there were still pockets of survivors and the story centered around Smith interacting, bonding, and ultimately failing to save them,” the report claimed. “For months this was the story. Warner’s didn’t much care for it and Smith and Weiss eventually came on board and all parties agreed to change things up. Well this change is pretty insane, the film is no longer a prequel, it’s a f***ing sequel!”
Smith rebuffed those claims during a press junket interview for Seven Pounds with Collider, instead doubling down on plans for the prequel and even offering a glimpse of what shape it could take:
“”We have a fantastic prequel idea…we’re still trying to work through a couple of bumps in the story. It’s essentially the fall of the last city — the last stand of Manhattan. The movie would be…within the body of the movie D.C. and then Manhattan would fall as the last city. It’s a really cool idea trying to figure it out…there’s a reason why we have to take a small band and we have to get into D.C. So we have to make our way from New York to D.C. and then back to New York.”
However, another spanner was thrown in the works when in January 2009, Lawrence, the director of the first movie, appeared to pour cold water on the prequel idea. “I have my beliefs on what was interesting about the first story and what was not so interesting about the first story, and I think that to go back, there has to be a truly viable reason to go back into that world that I think interests everybody, so that’s the real struggle,” he said. “The struggle is to find a story that brings us back in a way that’s hopefully just as interesting as the first time around.”
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He still appeared open to returning, provided these issues were fixed. “If we figure out the story, I’m absolutely involved in the prequel. … We’ve had conversations. The three of us, Will and Akiva [Goldsman, the writer of the first movie] and I, have sat down and talked, and there’s a writer that’s working on it right now. So we came up with the bones of a story, and now we’re waiting to see a script.”
Those obstacles evidently proved too substantial to surmount with Lawrence claiming in 2011 that the project was effectively dead. By 2012, the focus had shifted away from prequel plans to a straight sequel to the first movie with Deadline confirming a deal was in place for Smith to return, though in what capacity was still to be determined.
By 2014, in another twist, it was reported that the producers behind the original I Am Legend were looking at A Garden At The End Of The World, a spec script written by Gary Graham.
Graham was working at a midtown Manhattan Apple store prior to posting the script online, sparking a bidding war Warner Bros. won. Pitched as a sci-fi version of the John Wayne wild west classic The Searchers, it initially looked like the script would be retooled to serve as an I Am Legend sequel, a practice that’s not uncommon in Hollywood circles.
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Those plans ultimately never came to fruition but, by 2022, Deadline was reporting that the green light had been given to plans for an I Am Legend sequel featuring both Smith and Michael B. Jordan with Goldsman returning to write. Though no major plot points have been revealed, Smith did offer up information on how his character Neville would return.
Speaking during an appearance at the Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, he pointed to the presence of an alternate ending on the DVD release of the movie in which Neville survives. In this version, Neville ceases his experiments, realizing the zombies are attacking because of the experiments he is doing to them. They leave after he releases and female test subject and he eventually departs for a survivors colony in Vermont with Anna and Ethan.
”We’re going with the mythology of the DVD version where my character lived,” Smith told reporters. ”I can’t tell you any more but Michael B. Jordan is in and we’re doing it.” In the meantime. Steven Caple Jr., who directed Jordan in Creed II, is being lined up to helm the film, with Goldsman offering the smallest of hints as to what fans can expect.
“The world returns in a way that is kind of spectacular – an exciting playground for all of us – not your father’s I Am Legend,” he said.
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