I Am Legend Sequel and Prequel Ideas Were Bad Says Director

>I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence has been reflecting on the movie on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and why none of the sequel pitches worked. The filmmaker revealed if he had a chance to do the movie again, he’d keep the first hour and redo the rest. He also admits to the less than stellar CGI on the Darkseeker creatures

>Warners 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, and that was basically, 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

>The original ending to Smith’s I Am Legend revealed the creatures stalking Smith’s scientist are actually sentient, and he’s been the one hunting and killing them. Neville survived in this version but test audiences hated the ending, so it was re-shot so that the character dies during a moment of self-sacrifice

Could they have been good?

No

Threadly reminder to read the book

I recently re-watched the film, but something was off.
That wasn't the ending I remembered, what?

Wasn't the ending of the book they eventually killed him and then decades later they told stories about the last human who used to hunt them, almost like he was a "legend" to them.

i cant read

in the book he goes out to kill the vampires during the day, so for them he's their boogieman who comes and gets them while they sleep. in the end he realizes that he's the last of his kind and needs to let go and have the new vampire civilization live in peace. in the film they didn't really take that turn.

>but test audiences hated the ending
So fucking bullshit, since it's an infinitely superior ending.

Just like in the shining where the dude turns the axe on himself instead of the son instead of kubricks hackneyed shit.

>he's the last of his kind and needs to let go
whoa, just like white people

The Omega Man > Last Man on Earth > I Am Legend

Yeah but people are dumb as fuck, user.

What the fuck am I reading?

Where would you rank Quiet Earth there

I forgot how good the book was

It was all kinda bullshit that the remake missed the entire point of the story is how the vampires are sentient how the main character was the legend for them.

And I get how test audiences wouldn't have liked the original ending (in this remake), since the vampires in his version were just like mindless zombies rather than people that could speak. Having him die to what are essentially mindless zombies would just seem like bullshit. The change to the ending just made it so there was at least some point to his dying because he helped someone else to live. If he stayed more faithful to the original movie or book it would have made his dying still meaningful since he'd be helping a society to just move on without him haunting them.

In the book the monsters are really vampires, and at the end the protagonist gets captured and it's revealed that the vampires aren't actually monsters, and live in a society very similarly to how humans live. The protagonist has become a boogeyman story to the vampires, just like how vampires are a part of horror stories for us. That's why the book is called "I Am Legend".

>‘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.’
that's not true though, didn't he go to like an entire colony of people at the end?

What was the Arnold movie gonna' be like?

>Warners
fucking WB

They had some woman and her daughter pop into the story for whatever deranged reason and then Will Smith saves them so THEY go to the colony at the end.

The ones that the protagonist hunts are actually precursors to modern zombies.

Is there any movie adaptation that depicts the protagonist's cruel battle with sexual abstinence?

muh nigga

No. I am Legend was the last words of the book. He gets captured and sees the crowds outside gathering for his execution and realizes how terrified they are of him before accepting his death. In the book they were basically conventional vampires and could talk and were intelligent n sheit and it's revealed that some of them are just normal people who can't go outside at night while he was killing and conducting experiments on them indiscriminately while they slept.

It's actually pretty kino for a short story

>The noblest and most beautiful thing you can do is lie down and die white man.

That one dude that was his neighbour constantly screaming for him outside his house.

Americans need to be banned

I am legend was a 3/10 film. Only good part of the whole movie was the action scene at the end when they attack fresh prince at his house.

I haaaaated that fucking movie. They got it completely backwards. Neville isn't a savior. He is the devil. He is the boovey man.

Hell, there should have been no surviving humans at all. They could have done a sequel with him shown as a villain from the start.

Of course Will Smith's ego made him change the book and have Will be the savior of humanity. Probrably used the test audience to get his way.

lmao wants Neville pissed when the sentient vamps came and killed him poor crazy ned flanders