I AM LEGEND Director Francis Lawrence Confirms He's Involved with the Sequel
Earlier this year it was announced that Will Smith was set to return for a sequel to the post-apocalyptic zombie film I Am Legend and that he will be joined by Michael B. Jordan. We learned at the time that Akiva Goldsman was returning to write the script, and now the director of the original movie, Francis Lawrence, is involved as well.
During a recent interview with CB, Lawrence confirmed that he’s involved with the sequel, but it’s still got a ways to go:
"I have spoken to Akiva [Goldsman] a little bit about it, but I think that is still aways away. I'd love to do it. I've heard some things about I Am Legend. We actually don't have much, just brainstorming things for Constantine, but I'm sworn to secrecy on I Am Legend."
It’s good to see that he’s helping develop because after the first one was released, he didn’t think he would make a sequel. He previously said:
"[The studio] was really, really, really into coming up with something, and I just didn't know how to do it. I saw very quickly after the movie came out, and I went, 'People came to see the last man on earth. We've done the last man on earth, he died at the end of the movie, we can't do it again.' But people weren't in love with him as a character. It's not Indiana Jones, like this kind of iconic character that you just want to see again and again and again.
"And it just felt forced to do a prequel. We would have been doing Contagion. And to do something that's a follow-up either doesn't have him in it, or you have to do something really dumb, which is, you know, 'Scientists have taken his DNA and reanimated him somehow!' And that would have been really dumb, and so I just kind of bowed out."
He’s obviously open to a sequel now and they obviously have some ideas to play with. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. The first movie was based on the 1954 Richard Matheson novel and the film is set in New York City after a virus, originally meant as a cure to cancer, decimated humanity and created nocturnal mutants.
I’m a much bigger fan of Vincent Price’s 1964 adaptation, The Last Man on Earth. That was a great film. Regardless, the new film had some fun and interesting moments and I’d be curious to see how they will end up continuing this story.