It’s been almost a year since news broke that Will Smith is starring in an I Am Legend sequel with Michael B. Jordan, but we’ve finally got an update on the project and how it’s going to work around the original film’s ending. According to screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, the sequel will be taking a lot of cues from the hot post-apocalyptic series of the moment, HBO’s The Last of Us.
For the record, neither I Am Legend nor The Last of Us is about zombies per se, but they do both grapple with a virus that alters humanity and brings civilization crashing down. Via Deadline:
“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. I don’t know if they’ll climb up to the empire state building, but the possibilities are endless.”
As for how the sequel will deal with the original film’s ending, which ended with Smith’s character sacrificing himself, Goldsman is apparently going to ignore it altogether.
“We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film,” Goldsman said. “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.”
(Via Deadline)