After World War Z's Return, We Need This $585m Sci-Fi Sequel Even More
Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic.
For a while, it seemed like long-awaited movie sequels were all doomed to fail. The likes of Zoolander 2 and Dumb and Dumber To proved some things are best left in the past. But Hollywood loves nothing like nostalgia and a guaranteed audience, and for every Matrix: Resurrections, there are still winners like Mad Max: Fury Road and Top Gun: Maverick.
And there’s more to come: in the near future, we’ll see Heat 2 finally come to the big screen, and Brad Pitt’s long-awaited World War Z 2 has escaped development hell after first being mentioned 14 years ago. In fact, World War Z was envisaged by Paramount as a trilogy, but various attempts to get a sequel off the ground amounted to nothing. It’s arguably one of the most frustrating development hell stories of the century, and now it’s up to the slightly surprising choice of Edward Berger to direct it.
Hopefully, this is just further proof that strong ideas will eventually make it to the screen, even if they have to go through the pain of losing David Fincher along the way. And there’s another post-apocalyptic sci-fi sequel that’s been similarly troubled that can take hope from World War Z 2’s resurrection. Back in 2007, Francis Lawrence made a similarly bleak, but more intimate zombie outbreak blockbuster driven by an A-lister caught in the fallout of a global virus.
When a sequel for I Am Legend was announced in 2022, with Will Smith returning (despite being killed at the end of the original) and Michael B Jordan joining the cast, it looked like the long-discussed follow-up was imminent. Four years on, though, despite some major announcements, everything has been painfully slow. Fundamentally, sci-fi/horror fans deserve two great, big-budget franchises operating at full power, and it is high time I Am Legend 2 actually came to life.
Seriously, Where Is I Am Legend 2?
I Am Legend 2’s journey to the screen has been just as chaotic as World War Z 2’s, adding another similarity to the two book adaptations that took liberal approaches to the source material. After the first movie took more than $500m (just as World War Z did), discussions began, despite the slight barrier of Will Smith’s Robert Neville having heroically sacrificed himself at the end. Initially, Lawrence was in discussions to make a prequel that would show the early days of the virus outbreak, making it a lot more like World War Z.
Those talks evaporated, and Lawrence left the project, as the project was put on ice. Fans simply assumed we’d not get another outing, but the narrative shifted radically in March 2022 a whole decade after it was initially suggested that Smith might break his usual reluctance to make sequels for I Am Legend 2. Jordan’s addition to the cast was a huge draw, with Akiva Goldsman back writing the script, and eventually Steven Caple Jr. hired as director. And then, essentially two years of nothing.
Goldsman has recently offered another update, addressing the delay, and revealing that he’s still working on a second script, and it’s not been plain sailing: “I have run up against a series of obstacles that I refuse to allow to defeat me. That is the truth of that one. We're pressing on. We're trying. We're doing everything we can to get it made.” That doesn’t exactly sound like the firm positivity we want to hear, but at least it’s still in the works.
What We Know About I Am Legend 2's Story
The most significant thing we know about I Am Legend 2 is that it’s ignoring the ending of I Am Legend in order to bring Smith back. In the theatrical cut, Robert Neville dies, but in the alternate ending, which more closer aligned with Richard Matheson’s original 1954 novel, he realizes the Darkseekers are sentient rather than the mindless zombie vampires he assumed. He surrenders his female test subject captive and leaves New York in search of a survivor colony.
Smith addressed his return, and the sequel’s production journey in an April 2025 Drink Champs interview, revealing some of the story details: “What we were gonna do was the prequel, so we were gonna do the prequel. … And [Akiva Goldsman] was like, but wait, what if we make a new version from the alternate ending, where your character is still alive, and you know, Michael B. Jordan's character currently is the head of a new settlement... He's not my son... So there's a settlement in Connecticut.”
Goldsman has also promised that the sequel will be more faithful to the original novel, and revealed one major inspiration back in 2023 while offering some details of the script at that point: “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 to 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 [Richard] 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.”
More recently, he’s also promised to avoid killing any dogs, after the backlash at the tragic decision Neville was forced to make in the original movie: "I fear that I would not survive the backlash should we kill another dog. I'd like to point out that between the opening shot and the next shot, we killed almost everybody on the planet. That was OK. You kill one dog – I've never had more walkouts during test screenings."
The idea of I Am Legend 2 showing a society healing after a zombie outbreak will be very similar to the plot of World War Z 2, and it will be interesting to see the differing approaches. Let’s just hope we still get to see them both.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.