Tonight on Netflix: The ending of this movie with Will Smith divided fans, and the director himself regrets it

Spoilers – Warning, the article below contains potential spoilers. If you do not want to know its contents, please do not read the following…

With his new feature The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and Songbird in theaters tomorrow, director Francis Lawrence recently returned to one of his most famous works on the podcast. happy sad confused : The post-apocalyptic sci-fi film I Am Legend, in which Will Smith meets infected people in a New York City that has been completely abandoned by the population, will soon benefit from a Michael B. Jordan sequel.

Adapted from the literary classic written by Richard Matheson in 1954 (and already adapted for cinema in 1964, then in 1971), Lawrence’s film was somewhat distant from it, and especially in its conclusion, which may have surprised fans of the original work. .

At the end of the 2007 film, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) sacrificed himself in front of a horde of infected by detonating a grenade, allowing his two protectors to escape with an antidote meant for the survivors of humanity. Note that in the alternate version revealed on the DVD release of the film, Neville was saved by the leader of the Contaminated, from whom he agreed to release a woman he had captured for experimentation.

“I prefer the original ending to the two endings we did”Francis Lawrence stated, admitting that the conclusion of the original work was much stronger.

“Truthfully, I would build it today So that he can pick up from the end of the novel to really tell that story. I think with the amount of money that was spent, everyone was afraid to do something so nihilistic. But looking back, I think everyone went to see The Last Man on Earth And that everyone loved him for that reason and would enjoy I Am Legend despite this nihilistic ending.”

If you’ve never read Richard Matheson’s original novel, know that it’s not about the infected, it’s about vampires, and that in reality Robert Neville’s ending is not at all the same as in the “cinema”. In the final chapters, after eliminating a large number of them, he discovered that there were two types of vampires: the immortals and those who knew they were infected.

After forming a new society, they captured it and sentenced it to death for all crimes committed against them. In his final moments, Neville realized that humanity was simply mutating and that in the eyes of these new creatures, he himself had become… a legend.

(Re)discover all the hidden details of the movie…