2007's I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Will Smith, ended with Dr. Robert Neville using a grenade to sacrifice himself during a final confrontation with the movie's Darkseekers.
He did so to help a woman and her son reach safety, redeeming himself for the way he's hunted down and experimented on the Big Apple's infected. The DVD featured an alternate ending where Neville, realising he'd become a monster, handed over the women he'd captured before leaving the city behind.
Neville then travels to a human sanctuary while coming to terms with the fact that he was the "legend" haunting the infected beings and that they were not the mindless monsters he believed them to be. That's the ending which will be "canon" in the upcoming I Am Legend sequel.
Black Panther and Sinners star Michael B. Jordan has been attached to the movie for a while now, with the prevailing theory being that he'll play the son of Smith's character (as a passing of the torch, perhaps). Well, the Oscar-winner debunked that during a recent interview.
"What we were gonna do was the prequel, so we were gonna do the prequel," Smith shared (via SFFGazette.com). "And [Akiva Goldsman] was like, 'But wait, what if we make a new version from the alternate ending, where your character is still alive and you know, Michael B. Jordan’s character currently is the head of a new settlement?'"
"He’s not my son," the actor confirmed. "So there’s a settlement in Connecticut." It now seems more likely that these two will be at odds, though how close I Am Legend 2 is becoming a reality remains to be seen as it currently has no release date.
"I have a call with Michael B. Jordan tomorrow," the Suicide Squad star teased last December. "The script just came in. I’m probably giving away too much information. We’re going with the mythology of the DVD version where my character lived. I can’t tell you any more, but Michael B. Jordan is in and we’re doing it."
Writer Akiva Goldsman has previously said, "This will start a few decades later than the first...I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-30-year lapse. We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film."
Nothing more concrete than that has been revealed, though we still expect Lawrence to shoot the sequel before BioShock and Keanu Reeves' Constantine 2. The latter has yet to be confirmed by DC Studios, while the former is undergoing some changes at Netflix.
You can watch the full interview with Smith in the player below.