Will Smith’s Robert Neville character will be returning for an I Am Legend sequel – and he’s bringing Michael B. Jordan along for the ride.
Smith and Jordan will be teaming up for the next chapter of I Am Legend, which comes more than 15 years after the original, Deadline reported. It’ll be the first time the two stars will work alongside each other as actors and producers.
It’s
expected to perform well at the box office, with Smith and Jordan having grossed a combined massive total of $12.3 billion worldwide. The film’s original writer, Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman, is set to return to write and produce the sequel.Details surrounding the film are still scarce, but Goldsman did tease how “endless” the possibilities are for the new script.
The sequel “will start a few decades later than the first,” Goldsman revealed.
“I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we
see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-, 30-year lapse,” he continued. “You see how the earth reclaims the world, and there’s something beautiful in the question of, as man steps away from being the primary tenant, what happens? That will be especially visual in New York.”Smith starred in the 2007 film that followed his character, Robert Neville, in a nearly deserted, post-apocalyptic New York City ridden with zombies.
The original opened with $77.2M at the box office and went on to gross $256.4M domestically and $585.4M worldwide. The sequel’s announcement is the first major project with Smith’s name attached in the wake of his Oscars slap attack against Chris Rock.
Smith’s Emancipation film was released on Apple TV in October 2022. It was Smith’s first film release after the slap attack and the Academy Award winner couldn’t get past addressing his shocking actions at the 2022 Oscars.
“That was a horrific night, as you can imagine. There’s many nuances and complexities to it. But at the end of the day, I just — I lost it, you know?” Smith said on the Daily Show, as noted by Variety.
“I was going through something that night, you know? Not that that justifies my behavior at all… It was a lot of things. It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother, you know?” he continued. “All of that just bubbled up in that moment. That is not who I want to be.”