With Will Smith taking his talents elsewhere, Warner Bros. is now seeking to reboot the now dated I Am Legend (the awful digital effects work was dated the day of release).
Deadline reports that the studio is working on a reboot that isn’t meant to star Smith, who has been reluctant to do sequels and so far has avoided a reprise in Independence Day 2.
Warner is retrofitting A Garden At The End of the World, a spec script that the studio bought back in April from Gary Graham described as a sci-fi version of John Wayne’s The Searchers. When Graham was brought in to rewrite his script, the studio by then had talked to the I Am Legend producers and noted enough similarities to the themes and mythology of that film that they asked the scribe to consider a redraft to fit that property.
The studio made a previous attempt to prequelize Legend, hiring Arash Amel to write a script that would have brought Smith’s Robert Neville scientist character back, right before the calamitous events that left him alone on the planet. They just couldn’t figure it out and scrapped the attempt.
The 2007 original grossed $586 million worldwide, $256 million of it domestic.