I Am Legend 2 officially bringing back Will Smith, working around his pesky death

By the sounds of it, Will Smith is returning for the upcoming sequel to I Am Legend despite the fact that, yes, his character dies at the end of the first movie.

The sequel has certainly been a long time coming. I Am Legend was first released all the way back in 2007. It was in 2022 that reports first claimed that Will Smith was interested in revisiting the franchise, with some adding that Creed and Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan was also keen to join the project. Then, earlier this year, writer Akiva Goldsman confirmed that the film had entered active development, adding that it would take inspiration from The Last of Us - and now, we’ve got a much better idea about how the sequel will address the elephant in the room: Neville’s death.

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In case you’ve forgotten, at the end of I Am Legend, Neville blows both himself and the hemocytes up with a grenade, but there’s also an alternative version of the ending. In this iteration, Neville discovers the hemocytes’ sentience. When the leader makes a butterfly motion, it becomes clear that she’s trying to reunite with her mate - the hemocyte Neville is keeping in his house. It’s then that Neville realises that he’s possibly the villain by keeping them apart.

In the alternate version, he survives and it’s assumed that the upcoming sequel will use this chain of events. Writer Goldsman has confirmed that the film will “start a few decades later than the first”.

On how the sequel will take inspiration from The Last of Us, Goldsman added, “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."

The I Am Legend sequel remains in early development.