Editorial Staff
Veteran producer and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend, Batman & Robin, A Beautiful Mind) has brought production co Weed Road back to Warner Bros, in a multi-year first look deal.
Weed Road, who most recently had both its film and TV deals at MGM, are kicking off with sequels to Constantine and I Am Legend under the new deal. “We’re starting with two projects that are fun and very much Warners”, Goldsman tells Deadline. “…the sequel to I Am Legend, with Will and Michael B. Jordan, and the sequel to Constantine with Keanu Reeves that Francis Lawrence is going to direct.”
Constantine 2
The long-gestating sequel to the Keanu Reeves-Francis Lawrence fave is inching ahead :
“We’re doing it with JJ Abrams, and Francis and Keanu and I have been pretty deep in the story-breaking stage. This is a credit to Keanu, who endlessly has said, ‘this is the character I want to return to’. Finally, he said it enough times that it stuck.
The character is very much Keanu and the way he and Francis [Lawrence, director] saw the world of good and evil, and the wonderful and authentic noir where there is a world behind the world of good and evil coexist with our world right up close. Beyond that, we are still discovering it as I am writing the script.”
I Am Legend 2
Goldsman says of the sequel, which will star Will Smith and Michael B.Jordan :
“This will start a few decades later than the first. I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-30-year lapse. 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. I don’t know if they’ll climb up to the empire state building, but the possibilities are endless. We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film.
What Matheson was talking about was that man’s time on the planet as the dominant species had come to an end. That’s a really interesting thing we’re going to get to explore. There will be a little more fidelity to the original text.”
