I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence has admitted that a sequel to the hit movie would have ‘been really dumb’.
It’s been ten years since the Will Smith movie was released, but Francis revealed although the studio Warner Bros were ‘really, really, REALLY into coming up with something’ he just ‘didn’t know how to do it’.
The post-apocalyptic horror film saw Smith’s character, Robert Neville, living in a world that has been mostly wiped out after a virus went out of control.
The last man in New York – other than nocturnal mutants – Neville must discover a cure while defending himself from certain death.
SPOILER ALERT: Neville doesn’t make it out alive, and Francis said that he knew that there was no smart way to follow 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,’ he said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
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‘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.’
Originally intended as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Ridley Scott in the 1990s, the film broke box office records at the time.
A year after release rumours began to circle about a prequel which would reveal ‘how the disease spreads and the fall of the last great American city’.
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