I Am Legend sequel inspired by The Last of Us in the works

Like the fictional zombie plagues that have become such a huge part of the zeitgeist these past couple of decades, zombie media just won’t seem to die. The Last of Us is all the rage on HBO, The Walking Dead continues its inexorable shamble with a number of AMC spinoffs, and new projects crop up faster than you can blast their heads off with a shotgun.

I Am Legend was a 2007 zombie movie starring Will Smith. Loosely based on the 1954 novel by Richard Matheson, I Am Legend was the story of Robert Neville (Smith), the last uninfected person living in New York City who is doggedly trying to develop a cure for the plague.

The movie wrapped things up pretty tidily; by the end of the theatrical cut, Smith’s character had died to preserve his zombie cure. However, Deadline reports that a long-in-the-works sequel to I Am Legend is finally moving forward at Warner Bros. with both Will Smith and Michael B. Jordan set to star. And what’s more, writer-producer Akiva Goldsman says that it’s inspired by The Last of Us.

“This will start a few decades later than the first,” Goldsman told Deadline. “I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-to-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.”

I Am Legend sequel will treat the first movie’s alternate ending as canon

I Am Legend is a little different than your usual zombie story in that it’s not really a zombie story. In Matheson’s novel, infected people mutated into vampire-like creatures, with the ultimate ending twist being that the world had changed so much that it was Neville himself who was now considered the monstrous one for doing things like killing them while they were sleeping during the day.

Those nuances were largely lost in the theatrical cut of the film, which saw Smith’s character blow himself up to keep the zombies from destroying his newly created antidote. So how could Neville come back in I Am Even More Legend? (Yeah I’m going to make up names for this thing, because we all know it won’t just be called I Am Legend 2.)

The answer lies in the film’s physical release, which featured in alternate ending that was much closer in spirit to Matheson’s novel. In that version, which you can watch above, Neville realizes at the last moment that the infected woman he had captured in order to test his vaccine is actually the mate of the local group’s alpha male. The infected weren’t coming to attack him, but to rescue her!

Instead of blowing himself up, he tensely stands by as the infected come into his lab, reunite with the missing member of their community, and then leave. Neville departs New York at the end of the film with some new human friends he met during the movie, setting out for a survivor colony in Vermont.

I Am Legend writer is “obsessed with The Last of Us“

This alternate ending is the one that will serve as a jumping off point for the sequel, rather than the much bleaker ending of the theatrical cut. “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.”

Using the alternate ending is a brave choice; it’s rare to see a studio create a sequel that essentially de-canonizes the theatrical ending, though not unheard of (Blade Runner comes to mind). For my two cents, the alternate ending was far better for I Am Legend than what was seen in theaters, so this sounds like a great choice.

And hey, if it’s drawing inspiration from HBO’s stellar adaptation of The Last of Us, all the better.

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h/t Entertainment Weekly