Mark Protosevich and Francis Lawrence, the writing and directing team behind Warner Bros. adaptation of I Am Legend, a novel about the last man on Earth are set to go one better at 20th Century Fox.
They are making a movie about the Earth if man were suddenly wiped out, not even leaving vampires behind, though we expect a Will Smith lead or a bunch of characters to be present as our protagonists. Otherwise it would be a pretty boring movie, or a documentary and this is neither.
The studio have bought the rights to journalist Alan Wiesman’s non-fiction ecology novel The World Without Us, which depicted the future history of Earth if all of mankind was gone tomorrow. Fox have the idea of turning it into a 2 hour Hollywood feature.. ala The Day After Tomorrow.
The book explored how edifices and houses would deteriorate, how long and which man-made objects would linger and last, the environmental impact nuclear waste and other pollutants would have left unchecked and how nature would spread over built environments.
According to wiki…
Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years, and that radioactive waste, bronze statues, plastics, and Mount Rushmore would be among the longest lasting evidence of human presence on Earth.
The future history genre is one of my favourites, I liked an awful lot about their adaptation of I Am Legend but haven’t we kind of been here before with Lawrence? The best bits of that movie were it’s opening set in a deserted New York which had become so upside down that lions were the dominant species and trees had grown everywhere in what was now a jungle.
Which is kind of the point of this novel is it not? And where does this leave an I Am Legend prequel/sequel, surely Lawrence won’t then want to tackle this kind of sparse future again after this.
Provocative imagery, lots of CGI… and presumably animals will be the villains? I’m intrigued but I feel like I definitely need to hear more at this point and as we should keep in mind, Fox’s record for blockbusters lately have been diabolical.
One Comment
Haha, this is insane. I’ve read the book, which is pretty cool, but doing it as a movie? I bet you the only reason they went forward with this is because when you read the book, you instantly think – wow, the guys in I Am Legend didn’t put THIS much effort into creating a world without humans. The book is really just about how, really specifically, how the world would change without humans. So doing this as a film, I reckon it would just be another future film, but this time with scientific arguments to back up how they’ve made their sets look.
But by all means, knock yourselves out, Fox! I’ll see it!