In what certainly must qualify as an entry into Tales From Development Hell, Warner Bros. has hired Francis Lawrence, who directed the very slick CONSTANTINE, as director of the adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, I AM LEGEND, which has been in development from who-knows-when.
According to Variety, David Heyman, Akiva Goldsman, Neal Moritz and Erwin Stoff are producing the post-apocalyptic flick, with a Mark Protosevich script. In I AM LEGEND, Lawrence has inherited a project that has been tossed around for almost a decade. At one time, it had Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger attached, and at another time, had Michael Bay and Will Smith involved.
As for the film itself, it’s set in Los Angeles after a biological war, centering on a sole healthy survivor, a man who finds himself in a battle against nocturnal mutants. Lawrence and company will supervise a rewrite of the script, with a probable
2006 start date.
In case the story sounds familiar, it’s because Matheson’s novel has been brought to the screen twice before (albeit in variations), in 1964’s THE LAST MAN ON EARTH starring Vincent Price, and nearly a decade later in the 1971 Charlton Heston film, THE OMEGA MAN.
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