It’s been absolutely shocking that Warner Bros. never pulled the trigger on a second I Am Legend film, being that the 2007 adaptation starring Will Smith nearly topped $600M at the global box office. In fact, director Francis Lawrence openly discussed why he passed on the project, noting that both a sequel or prequel would have felt forced and tired.
No matter, with a box office that huge, Warners should have moved on without Lawrence, and it’s unclear why that never came to fruition. It’s been a head-scratcher for 15 years.
Digressing, there was a juicy nugget hiding within an article over at THR that details a lawsuit filed by Village Roadshow against Warner Bros. Pictures. It claims that the major studio is shutting it out from being a co-owner and financial partner on dozens of projects that are being developed based on movies they share the rights to in order to boost the value of its parent company’s streamer HBO Max.
Village Roadshow claimed it’s being excluded from several prequels, sequels or television shows that Warner Bros. has actively been developing based on shared rights, including Sherlock Holmes, the Ocean’s series, Ready Player One, Where the Wild Things Are, Yes Man, and… I Am Legend!
While there are no other details in the article, the inclusion of HBO Max suggests that Warner Bros. is working on a series adaptation to the I Am Legend lore, adapted from the late Richard Matheson‘s 1957 novel of the same name. This is purely speculative, of course.
In I Am Legend, Will Smith plays Robert Neville, a brilliant scientist who is a survivor of a man-made plague that transforms humans into bloodthirsty mutants.
“He wanders alone through New York City, calling out for other possible survivors, and works on finding a cure for the plague using his own immune blood. Neville knows he is badly outnumbered and the odds are against him, and all the while, the infected wait for him to make a mistake that will deliver Neville into their hands.”