I Am Legend Director Favored the Alternate Ending - The One We Never Got
I Am Legend (2007) is the third big screen adaptation of its namesake novel by Richard Matheson, after The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971).
It gave us memorable post-apocalyptic vistas, and one of Will Smith 's best roles. What it did not give us was a non-standard ending, which its director, Francis Lawrence, would have preferred.
To explain, I Am Legend takes place in a world where most of humanity was wiped out by a virus, and nearly all of the survivors turned into savage nocturnal creatures known as Darkseekers. Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) seems to be the only survivor, dwelling in the deserted, windswept Manhattan.
At day he's free to move around with his dog, at night he must hunker down, while Darkseekers prowl the streets. Besides trying to contact any other possible survivors, he's busy with catching Darkseekers and experimenting on them using his own blood, in hopes that his natural immunity would allow him to produce a cure for the virus.
The theatrical cut's ending is a pretty standard Hollywood fare. Neville finds other survivors, manages to produce a cure, then has to sacrifice himself to save them and the cure sample as a pack of Darkseekers breaks into his hideout.
The film's title is explained by Neville becoming a legendary figure of the surviving humanity.
However, it had a much grimmer meaning in the original cut, which ending follows the novel closely, and preserves its main plot twist – the infected are gradually regaining their sapience and starting to rebuild society, while still retaining their nocturnal habits.
In the book, Dr. Neville, before his death, realizes that his slaughter of the infected and experimentation on them in his attempts to find a cure, made him a monster who will live on in their legends, not unlike vampires of our own stories.
The film's original ending was brighter, with Neville surviving and hints of normal humans learning how to coexist with the Darkseekers.
The test audiences still hated it, though. As Francis Lawrence revealed to ScreenRant:
"I agree it's the better ending. I mean, it's the more philosophical version of the end, but in terms of story math we're doing everything you're not supposed to do, right? The hero doesn't find the cure, right?.. …And so you've basically turned everything on its head. We tested it twice and it got wildly rejected, wildly rejected, which is why we came out with the other one."
Well, it is possible that the test audiences simply disliked the idea of the main character actually being a bad guy who killed a whole bunch of sapient beings in his experiments. Or maybe there was not enough build-up and subtle hints about the Darkseekers' real nature during the early parts of the movie.