I Am Legend 2 has been greenlit, and Will Smith will reprise his role as Robert Neville. But how is that possible?
A little over 15 years after Will Smith’s I Am Legend came out, Warner Bros. finally gives fans a sequel. The original film was based on Richard Matheson’s novel and was one of the greatest CGI blockbusters that ever came out of the 2000s. A prequel film had been in discussion for a long time before Warner Bros. greenlit I Am Legend 2 and signed on Michael B. Jordan and, surprisingly, Will Smith.
What Happened In I Am Legend
The film follows Robert Neville, the last unaffected human living in New York, who spends all his days searching for a cure for the Darkseekers and sending out radio broadcasts in hopes that he will find other humans. The film had two endings.
In the first, Neville manages to synthesise a cure. He draws a vial of blood from the former Darkseeker woman’s blood and gives it to Anna (one of the survivors) before shutting her in a coal chute and sacrificing himself to protect the cure. Neville’s sacrifice saved humanity, and the Darkseekers remained cannibalistic monsters.
The second showed audiences a more book-accurate alternate ending. After the Darkseeker alpha male created a butterfly shape in the glass, attempting to enter the lab, Neville realised that the Darkseeker woman he had captured was the alpha’s mate, and they were just trying to retrieve her. He returns her to his mate and apologises after seeing the alpha’s emotional response to his mate’s return.
Neville realises that all his experiments have made him the true monster, and he leaves with Anna, hoping to find a survivor’s colony.
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What Will Happen In I Am Legend 2
During an interview with Deadline, Akiva Goldsman (who wrote the screenplay for I Am Legend) spoke about his plans for the sequel. He said that the events of I Am Legend 2 would take place decades after the first film and mentioned that he was planning to make some pretty drastic changes to the post-apocalyptic world.
Goldsman also confirmed what some fans already suspected when they heard that Will Smith would be returning to reprise one of his most iconic roles. The sequel would be doing away with the theatrical cut and following the book-accurate alternate ending that had been done away with because of the negative response to it during test screening.
Neville now understands that the Darkseekers have developed their own community and are a lot more intelligent than previously thought, seeing him as a monster and a danger to his survival. It’d been interesting to see how he’s grown since the discovery and whether he has spent the last decade or so making amends for all the harm he’s done to the Darkseekers.
Goldsman also mentioned that The Last of Us had strongly inspired the sequel. He’s keen to explore the idea of nature taking over the post-apocalyptic world and hinted that the story would be set in New York.
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Are you excited about Will Smith’s Robert Neville returning in I Am Legend 2?
