I Am Legend 2: Every Movie to Watch While You Wait For Will Smith's Big Return
When I Am Legend was released in 2007, fans of Robert Matheson’s influential novel were split over some of the choices the writers had taken with the source material. In case you haven’t read it, Matheson’s story ends with the protagonist, Robert Neville, realising that by relentlessly hunting the infected, he himself had become the monster—or the “legend”—in a world that had already left humanity behind.
In the theatrical release, Neville (played by Will Smith) sacrifices himself heroically to find a cure, thus making him the hero, relieving the story of its moral punch, and effectively denying us the chance of a sequel. This was later course-corrected thanks to an alternative ending that appeared on the movie’s DVD—one that both showed the creatures to be sentient (even sympathetic) and left Smith’s character alive, leaving the door open once again for a sequel. Now, after two decades and some false starts, I Am Legend 2 might finally be going ahead with Smith and Michael B. Jordan (who recently learned a thing or two about vampires in Sinners) leading the cast. Everything is still in the early stages, and given the tantalising possibility of releasing the film as a 20th anniversary legacy sequel, it’s likely we’ll have to wait until 2027 to see it.
Can’t wait that long for another hit? We’ve got you covered. In the following list—which I’ve arranged in no particular order—you’ll find ten titles that look at similar themes: specifically, what it might feel like to be the last person on earth, or at least to think you are until someone (or something) else shows up. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
When people think about post-apocalyptic landscapes, whatever world they conjure up probably owes something to The Road. Cormac McCarthy’s modern dystopian classic has become synonymous with the image of a man and son navigating a barren wasteland, so even if the Jordan and Smith characters don’t end up being related in I Am Legend 2, you can be sure that the filmmakers will have it in mind when they sit down to write the story.
The 2009 adaptation is as fateful to the source as’ No Country for Old Men was to that other great McCarthy novel—so if you’re a fan of that Coen brothers classic, be sure to check this one out. Since its release in 2009, the movie has influenced a huge number of shows, movies and video games, not least the next title on this list…
The Last of Us is HBO’s adaptation of the celebrated Naughty Dog video game and its phenomenal sequel. In case you haven’t been keeping up, the show stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay as a surrogate father and daughter—a classic trope of the genre—as they attempt to survive in a world populated by fungus-enhanced, zombie-like creatures. The rub in this one is that Ramsay’s character is immune and may, in fact, be carrying a cure.
The game and show were both inspired by the world of The Road, but with the added touch of a world rewilding as human influence wanes—as seen in I Am Legend, among other places. If you appreciated showrunner Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl or are curious about how I Am Legend 2 will presumably look, this is one to see.
If you like the idea of seeing an I Am Legend-style movie, but with a little more influence from the world of Mad Max, The Book of Eli could be the movie for you—especially if reports are to be believed that the sequel will involve Neville travelling outside New York and encountering new settlements across America.
The movie stars Denzel Washington as Eli, a man with a dog traversing a post-nuclear-holocaust USA. The story was written by Gary Whitta, who went on to work on Rogue One, After Earth and the video game adaptation of The Walking Dead.
Considering how inexpensively these kinds of movies can potentially be made for, it’s surprising more indie directors haven’t tried their hand at it. One of the most notable in the last decade was Rod Blackhurst’s Here Alone, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.
The story follows a young woman into the wilderness after a zombie-like epidemic decimates the human race. While there, she encounters a man and his daughter, which prompts her to revisit the painful memories of what happened to her own partner and child. Like Last of Us and The Road, Here Alone ticks all the boxes of the genre but manages to pull it off on a much lighter budget—so if you’re keen to see what that might look like, this might be the one for you.
If you’re a fan of all things Stranger Things, you might be interested in seeing where the Duffer Brothers started. The duo’s first feature, Hidden, which was released a year before Things began its iconic run on Netflix, takes place in a fallout shelter during an outbreak that might be turning people into—you guessed it—zombies.
The movie didn’t exactly make a huge splash, but it boasts an incredible cast (Alexander Skarsgard and Andrea Riseborough both feature) and works wonders with its spatial limitations. If you’re a fan of movies like Buried and Phone Booth, this might be the one for you.
It would be wrong to make a list like this and not give credit to a few originators. 1971’s The Omega Man isn’t actually the alpha adaptation of I Am Legend (that honour goes to the charmingly goofy—and actually quite faithful to the book—The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, from 1964), but it helped to popularise the genre in a way that its predecessor didn’t quite manage.
Don’t go into this one expecting Matheson’s downbeat and philosophical approach—this is a movie without vampires and one in which Charlton Heston, not for the first time, plays a Christ-like figure. Heston and producer Walter Seitzer would go on to collaborate on Soylent Green a few years later—so if you’re a fan of that cult classic, you might want to check it out.
If you like Matheson’s story for its more philosophical moments (which, to be fair, the Will Smith movie didn’t quite tap into as much as fans of the book would have liked) and don’t mind trying something a little farther afield, you might be interested in checking out In My Room—a last man on earth story by the German filmmaker Ulrich Kohler.
Kohler’s film premiered in Cannes in 2018 and got rave reviews from critics, who praised it for its offbeat and strangely hopeful tone. In some ways, this is more a film about touching grass than contemplating obliquity—so if you appreciate the films of, say, Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, First Cow), you might really like it.
Four years after The Omega Man was released, the actor L.Q. Jones independently produced and directed A Boy and His Dog, an adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s novel, which also boasts a title that most of the movies on this list could use. The story—which is set in the distant year of 2024 (eek)—follows a young lad and his telepathic dog through a dystopian wasteland somewhere in the South West of the United States.
If you’re a fan of the other movies on this list and haven’t seen it, I highly recommend seeking it out. Jones’ playful tone is said to be one of the key influences on the Fallout video game series, so if you’ve been appreciating that show, this one might be right up your alley.
And speaking of Oblivion, if you’re interested in a “Last Man” movie with more of a sci-fi twist, I can happily recommend this underappreciated Tom Cruise movie. This is the one where Cruise plays a repairman left on Earth to conduct the last few jobs (essentially turning the lights off) before joining the rest of the human race on a distant colony.
This was the first collaboration between Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski—so if you like what the duo went on to do with Top Gun: Maverick, you might be interested in checking it out. Oh, and if the plot sounds familiar, just wait till you get a load of the last movie on our list…
Yes, as many people in 2013 quickly noted, Kosinski’s movie was essentially a live-action remake of the 2008 Pixar classic, WALL-E. This is a movie about the last of a fleet of adorable robots that were left to clean the mountains of trash that humanity left behind.
In the movie’s impeccable, dialogue-free opening half hour, he meets a sleek robot named EVA, falls in love, and ends up following her to the last human space colony. This is a gem of Pixar’s golden age, a film that fans of Ratatouille, Up and even I Am Legend will absolutely adore.
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