I haven’t really been following the latest adaptation of I Am Legend, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that not only did they reshoot the ending to make it less dismal, but apparently their first take wasn’t faithful to the source material to begin with. What, is it going to end with the vampires wheeling out a giant cake that says “Congratulations! You Am Legend!”

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I rarely get worked up about lousy interpretations of my favourite genre offerings. I stopped caring long before my top three horror movies were remade into shoddy copies, so it isn’t the fact that they’re tinkering with my favourite horror novel that has me upset. I’m just dismayed that my estimation of Hollywood could sink even lower. Why purchase the rights to I Am Legend only to change arguably the best part of the novel? Isn’t that a little like buying the rights to Jaws and asking Steven Spielberg to take out the shark?

This reminds me of what happened with the movie Payback. Director Brian Helgeland wanted to succeed where others had failed and make a straight-up, modestly budgeted adaptation of a Richard Stark novel. Then Mel Gibson became interested. By the time the studio was done with it Helgeland was kicked out of the editing suite, just about every scene was altered, an additional third of the movie was tacked on, and Payback was a farce.

There’s no reason that I Am Legend couldn’t be made on a tiny budget which would allow for greater artistic risks and less of a need for a huge return. 30 Days of Night certainly showed that it was possible. Add Will Smith and the outlandish budget that comes with him and suddenly Robert Neville’s greatest threat isn’t creatures of the night but focus groups and nervous executives.

One thing’s for sure. I’d love to see this creative team take a crack at something like Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Movies, Vampires. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.