![Mar 27, 2022; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Will Smith accepts the award for best actor in a leading role in for his performance in \"King Richard\" during the 94th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre. Mandatory Credit: Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_crop,x_0,y_165,w_2976,h_1674/c_fill,w_720,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/images/ImagnImages/mmsport/385/01kka2ekmrdb9sx7nbf8.jpg "Mar 27, 2022; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Will Smith accepts the award for best actor in a leading role in for his performance in \\"King Richard\\" during the 94th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre. Mandatory Credit: Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY")
At last, Will Smith is opening up on why the infamously changed ending to I Am Legend was the fault of its own audience!
Among Will Smith’s long list of film hits, 2007’s I Am Legend has become…well, legendary. Just not for the reasons Smith would have liked. It was the latest remake of Richard Matheson’s landmark novel starring Smith as Robert Neville, seemingly the only survivor of a virus that killed most of humanity while mutating others into vicious nocturnal monsters. The film followed Robert as he tried survive in New York while searching for a cure.
The movie’s theatrical conclusion has Robert trapped in his home’s lab alongside fellow survivor Anna (Alice Braga). He gives her a bottle with the newly created cure before pushing her and her son out. As the Darkseekers close in, Robert sacrifices himself with a grenade to destroy them all.
This ending was criticized at the time for how it strayed from the book, and then became an even bigger deal when the movie’s DVD contained an alternate, much more faithful ending. As the Darkseekers come in, Robert sees one trying to rescue a captive Darkseeker. It hits Robert that, rather than mindless beasts, they still have intelligence and are trying to rescue one of their own. It dawns on him that to the Dayrkseekers, Robert is the monster hunting them down. A guilt-stricken Robert lets the Darkseekers go while joining Anna and her son on their journey to look for other survivors.
To this day, many will cite the alternate ending as far better. So why was it switched?
Why was I Am Legend changed?
Speaking to the Rap-Up podcast, the Oscar-winner was asked about I Am Legend and revealed the the alternate ending was actually the original ending for the movie, but claimed “it was the only movie I’ve ever had that the audience booed.” After quickly recapping both endings, Smith detailed the reaction.
“We tested it," he recalled. "So how they do these things is they put it in front of an audience. You know, you get a couple hundred people, they fill it out and you fill out, you know, there's five boxes and you say either excellent, very good, good, poor, very poor. And what they do is they take the top two boxes and if you score, you know, 90 percent in the top two boxes, excellent and very good, you're pretty sure you have a good movie. It was the lowest scoring movie I've ever had.”
Smith added that the movie scored 51 in the top two boxes while the complaints were all about the ending. Per Smith, the audience simply couldn’t accept it as, “He's not the monster. They're Darkseekers. They've been chasing them. And there was something that was just horrific. They couldn't accept it. They were like, no, you're not the monster. We didn't watch this whole movie to figure out that you're the monster. No, they're the monsters. So they felt cheated.”
Following that screening, which was just six months before the film’s release, the studio ordered reshoots for the new ending with Robert dying. Both Smith and director Francis Lawrence have expressed how they consider the original ending the canon one.
To many, this is one of the biggest examples of a test audience ruining a movie. The entire point of Matheson's book is that Robert is seen as the monster hunting down people whose only crime is surviving this plague in a different form. He is the Legend of the title, the Boogeyman they all fear. His guilt over that pays off on Robert’s single-minded attitude throughout the movie and how he re-embraces his own humanity, letting these creatures live.
Notably, the movie is getting a sequel that will follow the canonical ending where Robert survives and is still trying to help humanity and establish a cure for the Darkseekers. That it’s ignoring the theatrical ending is the final word on which version is seen as better.
It’s amazing that almost two decades later, I Am Legend has grown its own myth regarding its ending, with Smith issuing a warning on how tricky trusting an audience can be.
I Am Legend is streaming now on Netflix. The sequel, which will star Smith as well as Michael B. Jordan, is currently in development.