Right about now I bet Will Smith and the group of studio suits responsible for the ending of I Am Legend are wishing they’d gone with the alternative version squirreled away in the film’s DVD extra features. If you’ve seen I Am Legend then you know that at the end of the theatrical version, Will Smith’s character very clearly dies. He blows himself up to buy time for someone else to escape with the cure. In the alternate version which wasn’t used, he lives and drives off to fight another day. So when they started work on a follow up to the film, word was that it would be a prequel since, with Will Smith dead, a sequel would be nearly impossible.

Now it looks like they may have done a complete about face. According to a scooper at AICN they’ve scrapped they’re prequel plans and decided to make I Am Legend 2 a straight up sequel. Rather than taking place in the middle time period we didn’t see in the first film, when the plague is just taking hold and there are groups of survivors, the next movie may take up right where the last one left off.

Does that mean Will Smith won’t be in I Am Legend 2? That seems unlikely. He’s the big draw to this project, without him it becomes barely better than a direct-to-DVD sequel. He’s also involved in developing the second one, which wouldn’t make any sense if it’s not something he’s going to star in. No there’s probably something much worse going on here. Somewhere in Hollywood a team of writers is sitting around thinking up ways in which to undermine the original movie’s already awful ending by thinking up some lame excuse for Will Smith not to be dead. He was blown clear of the explosion! An accident with one of his experiments, which happened entirely off camera, gave him superpowers! He’s a ghost wreaking vengeance on those nasty mutants who did him wrong! Insert your own lame, soap opera like reason for him to live here. It probably won’t be worse than whatever they come up with. Let’s hope this rumor gets debunked, and soon.