At the end of I Am Legend, Will Smith dies. Spoiler! This death by explosion makes the prospect of a sequel to I Am Legend dicey, so what we originally heard was that the follow-up movie (the film made a bunch of dough, so there had to be a follow-up) would be a prequel.
But now Aint It Cool is reporting that the new film will in fact be a sequel to the original. What’s really funny here is that there was an ending to I Am Legend where Smith survives, which could have made a sequel way easier to imagine. The one time a studio chooses the right ending and they get fucked by it!
I’ve been rewatching the Planet of the Apes films for a proposed retrospective on this site, and one thing that I have found fascinating about those movies is how they could keep on making sequels despite having some pretty downbeat endings. Hell, they blow up the entire Earth at the end of the second movie and still manage to eke out three sequels. In a perfect world, I Am Legend II (or II Am Legend, as AICN cleverly calls it) would take a note from those films and craft sequels that tell the story of the world, not necessarily of just the character. But with Smith heavily involved and expected to star, that seems unlikely.
So if this rumor is true, how the fuck do they sequelize the movie and have Smith star? Best guess below wins a No Prize.