Francis Lawrence never planned to make an ‘I Am Legend’ sequel.
The 46-year-old filmmaker helmed the zombie apocalypse 2007 movie which starred Will Smith and although Warner Brothers Studios were keen to make a sequel, Lawrence admitted he couldn’t think of a possible story.
Speaking to Happy Sad Podcast, Lawrence said: "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."
The original film followed scientist Robert Neville (Smith) who is a survivor of a man-made plague that transforms humans into bloodthirsty mutants.
As he wanders alone through New York City, he spends his days calling out for other survivors and trying to find a cure for the plague using his immune blood.
Although Neville successfully finds a cure, it comes at a cost of his own life but Lawrence admitted that if they planned to do a sequel Smith’s character would have to remain dead or cloned and brought back to life, and he said that "would have been really dumb".
He said: "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."
Francis Lawrence never wants to make a I Am Legend sequel
