Caffeinated Clint
Rather than continue to punish themselves with ways of sequelizing (or prequelizing) the Will Smith version, Warner Bros has decided to simply reboot the science-fictioner.
Though the producers of the 2007 picture are back, Will Smith won’t be. It’s unclear whether the new film will have any connection to the previous film incarnation or not.
Deadline reports :
Warner is retrofitting A Garden At The End Of The World, a spec script that the studio bought back in April from Gary Graham, who was working at the Apple store in midtown Manhattan when he posted his script on the Black List website and got the attention of CAA and manager Brooklyn Weaver. They signed him and sent his script out. Amid several bids, Warner Bros acquired what was 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.
Original I Am Legend producers Akiva Goldsman of Weed Road, Overbrook’s James Lassiter and Safehouse Pictures’ Joby Harold are on board to produce, along with Vertigo’s Roy Lee, and Weaver. 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.
Not the first time a spec has been retooled to be an installment of an already-existing franchise.
