Filmmaker Akiva Goldsman and his production company, Weed Road, signed a new deal with Warner Bros. Pictures and revealed Dr. Robert Neville is coming back to life for I Am Legend 2.
In an interview with Deadline, Goldsman expressed he was excited about his new deal with Warners and that he will focus on two massive projects, the I Am Legend sequel and the sequel for Constantine. With the I Am Legend sequel, Michael B. Jordan will be a part of the cast.
I Am Legend came out in 2007, earning $585 million worldwide. While Goldsman couldn’t say any specifics, he did confirm that the film will be more like Richard Matheson’s novel that the first was based on, which was released in 1954.
“This will start a few decades later than the first,” he said. “I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-30-year lapse. You see how the earth reclaims the world, and there’s something beautiful in the question of, as man steps away from being the primary tenant, what happens? That will be especially visual in New York.”
He continued, “I don’t know if they’ll climb up to the empire state building, but the possibilities are endless. 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.”
The initial film ended with Smith dying to protect the two survivors, a mother and her child. He takes a grenade and blows the lab, killing the Darkseekers while the survivors are in a fire-proof space. The alternate ending, for those who had the DVD release, consisted of Smith respecting the Darkseekers, but he lives.
The book ended Ruth killing Neville with poison.
