Deadline announced today that an I Am Legend sequel with Will Smith and Michael B. Jordan is going ahead. Akiva Goldsman is penning the script.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. First of all Will Smith’s character is dead, so does this mean it’s a prequel? If it is a prequel there really isn’t any point in showing the lead up to the most dramatic part of the story which was in I Am Legend.
Yes, seeing Michael B. Jordan and Will Smith together on screen would be great but this isn’t the movie to do it in.
A sequel we didn’t need
I Am Legend veered away from the novel by Richard Matheson that it was based on and completely ruined the ending. Yes, I Am Legend made a lot of money but people aren’t dying for a sequel. No one is out there hoping for this. Bad Boys 3 made sense because people loved Bad Boys 2 and so Bad Boys 4 Eva was a box office smash. But no one wants a Hancock 2 even though it made a lot of money because people didn’t like the movie. Suicide Squad made $800 million but people hated it, so when they did the remake it was a huge box office flop.
I just don’t see any reason for this other than Hollywood being completely out of ideas and trying to turn I Am Legend into a franchise when the story does not lend itself to one at all.
I like Akiva Goldsman and loved his work on Fringe but his recent work has been patchy at best. Angels & Demons and Transformers were the last 2 screenplays he wrote, both disappointments.
Making a Pandemic movie during Covid
Also the biggiest issue I have and what a lot of people will have is the essential plot is that Will Smith was the last man on earth because of a pandemic. We are living through a pandemic right now. The last thing people want to see during a pandemic that has caused millions of death and severly disrupted people’s lives is a movie about a pandemic. Maybe they could have got away with a sequel about 2010 but making this in 2022 seems like one of the worst ideas I’ve heard.
What do you think?
