Will Smith’s I Am Legend was based on a novel of the same name by Richard Matheson. The same book has been made into movies several times, including once as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, and once as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. In every version a solitary man seems to be the only survivor of a horrible plague that has wiped out most of the earth’s population and turned the few remaining souls into vampires.
But it seems as though the last man on Earth wasn’t the last man after all — because now Smith is making an I Am Legend sequel and not only will he be in it, Creed and Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan will be in it as well. Deadline doesn’t have any plot specifics on what they are calling the “next chapter” in the story, but they say that both Smith and Jordan have signed on for the project, which will be written by Akiva Goldsman, who also wrote the script for the first I Am Legend. At the moment, there’s no director attached to the project.
After news of the movie broke online, Smith posted this image from I Am Legend to his Instagram (and tagged Michael B. Jordan in it as well):
I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but if this next I Am Legend really is a sequel, it will be interesting to see how exactly they include Smith’s character. (You can read the Wikipedia plot synopsis if you want to know what I’m hinting at.) I Am Legend did have an alternate ending that seems like much more fertile ground for making a sequel, but that wasn’t the ending seen in theaters. Maybe they’ll pretend like the alternate ending was the real ending all along? Is there any precedent for that?
Regardless, I think audiences will be interested in this project, even if they don’t particularly care about I Am Legend. Smith and Jordan are two of the biggest and most charismatic movie stars in the world. The thought of them together in any project is very intriguing.