Will Smith's I Am Legend 2 Reveal Fixes The Original Movie's Worst Mistake
While the long-awaited sequel to "I Am Legend" is still making progress, according to star Will Smith, it will be telling a story that may surprise fans of the 2007 movie. As anyone who's seen the original film knows, Smith's return for a sequel raises some eyebrows, considering his character dies in a grenade explosion at the end. But what many might not know is that the movie originally had a much different finale, one where Smith's Robert Neville survives. While it ended up as a bonus feature on home video releases, that's the ending "I Am Legend 2" will follow.
"You have to be a real 'I Am Legend' buff to know this, but in the first, theatrical version, my character dies," Smith told Variety, "But on the DVD there was an alternate version of the ending where my character lived. We are going with the mythology of the DVD version."
Instead of running into a wall of the creatures with a grenade, the alternate ending has Neville recognizing the humanity that remains in the Darkseekers and coming to somewhat of a truce with them. He's last seen with fellow survivors Anna (Alice Braga) and Ethan (Charlie Tahan) as they leave Manhattan searching for others. Many critics at the time complained that the new, explosive climax was a mistake.
In a 2008 review, Vulture commented, "This alternate finale humanizes the bad guys and makes for a much more satisfying conclusion."
Why was the ending to I Am Legend changed?
Test audiences weren't crazy about seeing Robert Neville make peace with the Darkseekers after the creatures had been portrayed mostly as mindless monsters throughout the film. In an interview with Screen Rant, "I Am Legend" director Francis Lawrence said of the originally planned ending, "We tested it twice and it got wildly rejected, wildly rejected, which is why we came out with the other one."
Not only would the intended ending have been more thematically in line with the 1956 Richard Matheson novel the movie is based on, but it also would have made the title of the film make a lot more sense. Neville was meant to realize that the Darkseekers aren't the thoughtless killing machines they've been made out to be the whole run time. In the first cut, we see that they show compassion and care for one another. To them, Neville is the bad guy. He is a monster of legendary proportions. He is legend.
While retroactively changing a movie's ending like this will inevitably confuse some viewers, the fact that Smith is still interested in a sequel all these years later is proof of his passion for the project. His return is evidence that, much like his antagonists in "I Am Legend," Robert Neville doesn't die easily.