Writer/producer Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road production company has signed a multi-year first-look deal with Warner Bros. Pictures following his previous arrangement at MGM.
The deal is being made with the intent of bolstering Warner Bros theatrical franchise output and a focus on IP that can play on a global scale theatrically.
Goldsman’s immediate work as part of the deal will be to move forward on the sequels to 2005’s “Constantine” and 2007’s “I Am Legend”. Both films were strong performers for Warner Bros. Pictures and are being resurrected – albeit with different approaches in mind.
Keanu Reeves will reprise his role of supernatural exorcist and demonologist John Constantine in the “Constantine” sequel following the $280 million worldwide gross of the original. Goldsman, who is writing the script, tells Deadline:
“We’re doing it with JJ Abrams, and Francis and Keanu and I have been pretty deep in the story-breaking stage. This is a credit to Keanu, who endlessly has said, ‘this is the character I want to return to’. Finally, he said it enough times that it stuck.
The character is very much Keanu and the way he and Francis [Lawrence, director] saw the world of good and evil, and the wonderful and authentic noir where there is a world behind the world of good and evil coexist with our world right up close. Beyond that, we are still discovering it as I am writing the script.”
Goldsman was a bit more forthcoming on the “I Am Legend” sequel which the studio has been trying to crack for years. Michael B. Jordan has been cast in the feature and Goldsman says the film will lean into the original Richard Matheson novel and takes place many years after the first:
“This will start a few decades later than the first. I’m obsessed with The Last of Us, where we see the world just post-apocalypse but also after a 20-30-year lapse. You see how the earth reclaims the world, and there’s something beautiful in the question of, as man steps away from being the primary tenant, what happens?
That will be especially visual in New York. I don’t know if they’ll climb up to the empire state building, but the possibilities are endless. We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film.
What Matheson was talking about was that man’s time on the planet as the dominant species had come to an end. That’s a really interesting thing we’re going to get to explore. There will be a little more fidelity to the original text.”
Goldsman remains a free agent in terms of TV and has the Tom Holland-led Apple TV+ series “The Crowded Room” on the way whilst he remains busy as producer on “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” and “Star Trek: Picard”.
