Via PZ Meyers, Bad Astronomy has an alternate ending that was filmed for I Am Legend (it's about 5 minutes long).

It's better than what they actually showed in theaters, but it's still not all that great.

[spoilers]












I liked that this ending actually validates the intelligence of the night stalkers. Neville's character comes across as pretty dense for not realizing this sooner. But I kept wondering whether those hiss-screams are actually supposed to be a language, or is there information content about the same as non-linguistic grunts and howls. If they're so smart, why don't they change their friggin clothes? What is their new culture going to look like?

I think it was a bad direction to go to have them act like crazed zombie beasts. It would have been cool if they were still very fast and strong, with high metabolisms, but hadn't entirely lost the power of speech. And I would have liked to have seen the actual ending of the novella. Neville kills one of them, so they capture him and prepare to execute him. Only at the end does he realize that he is the outdated aberration and that they are the new norm. Then you could end with the actual line of the title...that's left out of this ending.

Sigh...this whole thing just shows an ugly aspect of modern filmmaking, how movies are screened and engineered for audience consumption based on post-screening surveys. I guess that's inevitable. A large percentage of the revenue is made on opening day. I guess for all my complaints for movies like No Country For Old Men, at least it had some integrity. I doubt that ending screened very well.