Francis Lawrence is making waves with his ‘Red Sparrow’ interviews and now he shares why he was against a sequel to ‘I Am Legend.’ Not only that, but he didn’t want to be involved with a prequel project either. That isn’t to say that the studio didn’t want to revisit a Will Smith action thriller which had brought in almost $600 million at the box office.
As to the direction the Warner Bros. and the rest who were involved wanted to go with a sequel, Lawrence shared:
“[The studio] 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.”
I’m sure we can all agree that Lawrence made the right decision in not trying to continue this series. As to how they would have gone back in time or moved things forward? The director was very much against going either route:
“And it just felt forced to do a prequel. 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.”
Thankfully, neither of these ideas ever ended up seeing the light of day. There could have been more directions the studio could have gone with the film if Will Smith’s character wasn’t killed at the end but even that would have felt forced. This wasn’t a character that you could feel sympathy for past losing his best friend. Hell, losing his dog gave a more emotional impact than losing his family in flashbacks or his life at the end of the movie.
Are you glad that Francis Lawrence didn’t revisit the world of ‘I Am Legend’? If the studio had gone through with their plans would you have preferred a sequel or a prequel? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Happy Sad Confused podcast
