I Am Legend is a horror movie based on a popular story by Richard Matheson, but it had one moment that angered fans, and Will Smith recalls how they managed to pull it off. Smith took part in a retrospective about I Am Legend screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and discussed how they pitched this infamous moment.

There is a moment during I Am Legend when fans at the test screenings stood up and walked out of the theater in disgust. This moment saw the story’s hero, Dr. Robert Neville (Smith), forced to strangle his beloved German shepherd dog, Sam, to death. While he had no other choice, killing the dog was too much for the audience to bear.

In the THR interview, Smith explained that he went into a meeting with Alan Horn, the head of Warner Bros. When he and Goldsman walked in, they saw four giant pH๏τos of German shepherds behind Horn’s desk. Horn was also crying as he told the two the story about one of his German shepherds dying. Goldsman said Smith had something to pitch and stepped aside.

“Alan Horn is in tears, he’s crying, holding a picture of his German Shepherd and he says, ‘Guys, I promise you, your lead actor cannot choke a dog to death in an American movie.’ That seems like a fair ᴀssessment! But Akiva said ‘stage play.’

And what happens in the sH๏τ is you just pan off, and the whole scene is just played on my face. You hear the sound of the paws, the nails scratching on the floor until they slow down and stop. It’s super painful, but the audience doesn’t have to suffer it.

[Akiva] figures out how to find that sweet spot in the middle artistically and creatively that lands the idea without destroying the audience with it.”

What This Means For I Am Legend

Some Things About I Am Legend Still Remain Controversial

In the interview, Will Smith said that Akiva Goldsman was his “individual, greatest cinematic collaborator.” The two didn’t just work together on I Am Legend. Goldsman also wrote the script for I, Robot, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novel. That film received positive reviews and was another solid box office hit.

For I Am Legend, it received considerable criticism for the dog-killing scene. However, for the story itself, it made sense. Neville tirelessly hunted and killed the creatures around the town during the days when they slept. However, he became careless, and the creatures set a trap for him one day.

The creatures attack, and while Neville and Sam kill them all, one of them bites the dog during the fight. Since bites can infect dogs, Neville realized that his beloved German shepherd was going to end up infected and turn. He strangled his dog to death out of love to keep it from finding pain after changing. For many audience members, that was too much.

Our Take On I Am Legend’s Dog Scene

The Scene Could Have Been Worse With The Original Ending

However, for I Am Legend, the film received considerable criticism, and only part of it involved the hero killing his beloved dog. The dog’s death was too much for some fans, but other moments in the adaptation angered fans of the source novel. It all involved the ending and what it meant for the story.

In Matheson’s novelette, Robert Neville dies by suicide, and the story reveals that the infected are intelligent and see him as the villain, a serial killer murdering them in their sleep. This adds an even darker meaning when he killed his dog to keep it from being infected, but without realizing that the infected were not monsters at all.

The I Am Legend movie alters this ending. Neville discovers more uninfected people, and it reveals that a cure might be possible to save the world. By creating a cure, it makes Neville’s euthanizing of his dog more humane, whereas the novel’s ending would have made the hero an even bigger monster.

Source: THR