'I Am Home Alone' Trailer - The Next Christmas Classic

I love trailers.  I mean, who doesn't?  [FYI- I'll be posting The Best Trailers of 2010 next week]  But if there's one thing I love more than a good trailer, it's a really well done fake trailer.  And, one of the best I've seen this year is making its rounds on YouTube right now thanks to Jeff Schmalz.  What if that fateful Christmas Macaulay Culkin spent home alone, he wasn't attacked by two idiots but a hoard of flesh-craving zombies?

Hit the jump to check out I Am Home Alone.

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Director Talks 'I Am Legend' Prequel

On this, I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence agree: The most intriguing part about the story is to look back on how Robert Neville (Will Smith) became the only man left, or so he thought. A prequel is really the next logical step.

And now Lawrence tells Sci Fi Wire that a script for that prequel is being written, with input from himself, Smith, and producer Akiva Goldsman, who's also an Oscar-winning writer. "Yeah, if we figure out the story, I'm absolutely involved in the prequel," said Lawrence. "We've had conversations. The three of us, Will and Akiva and I, have sat down and talked, and there's a writer that's working on it right now. So we came up with the bones of a story, and now we're waiting to see a script."

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Overseas Box Office Churns Out $9.9 Billion in 2008

More evidence that, on the whole, movies are immune to tough economic times. While most other sectors are reporting at least some losses, the motion picture industry produced more revenue in 2008 than it did in 2007.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the total was up 4% from the previous year, and just shy of $10 billion worldwide, not counting the United States, which racked up $9.6 billion in receipts for the second straight year. The king of the hill was Paramount, which represented the year's biggest-grossing film in other territories (Indiana Jones), as well as Iron Man and the DreamWorks animated movies Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. All told, Paramount earned $2.037 billion, a new record for the studio. The Dark Knight helped push Warner Bros. into second place on the overseas charts. We tend to forget that I am Legend earned most of its money in other countries in 2008, because it was a December '07 release in the United States, but its $210 million in foreign revenue was a big reason Warners made $1.8 billion. In fact, Legend and the Batman sequel generated a third of the studio's earnings.

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Will Smith Touts 'I Am Legend' Prequel

Before we get started here, let me take a sidebar: Does anyone else think John Legend's greatest hits CD will be called I Am Legend? That's a goldmine, right? I Am Legend has certainly been a goldmine for Will Smith, and the Seven Pounds star has been as active talking about franchising that film and Hancock as he has Seven Pounds, which arrives in theaters in two weeks. Smith sat down with Collider and was gracious enough to reveal an awful lot about where the Legend story goes next, or goes back to.

"We have a fantastic prequel idea…we’re still trying to work through a couple of bumps in the story. It’s essentially the fall of the last city – the last stand of Manhattan. The movie would be…within the body of the movie D.C. and then Manhattan would fall as the last city. It’s a really cool idea trying to figure it out…there’s a reason why we have to take a small band and we have to get into D.C. So we have to make our way from New York to D.C. and then back to New York."

And there you go. That's precisely what they need to do. You have to make the prequel before you make a sequel, I think, but this still keeps the door open for a part three, kinda sorta. In any event, this story has loads of potential, and I can't wait for the extremely tragic third act. Most Hollywood movies never go that route, but it's kind of unavoidable here, don't you think?

'I Am Legend' Prequel Now a Sequel?

Although Ain't It Cool News has a great track record with reporting stories before they become well-established facts, they've whiffed on quite a few, as well. So when that site says it's reporting a story from an untested source, you should definitely weigh this one appropriately.

We know there will be another I Am Legend movie. The apocalyptic Will Smith flick made too much moolah not to at least consider a follow-up. The great thing about I Am Legend is that both a sequel and a prequel are practical. You can see where civilization was before the events of the movie we've seen, and you can see how civilization re-integrates following those events. I'm not saying they'd make great movies, but you wouldn't have to think too hard to plot an outline. Or outline a plot.The prequel is the more appealing story, because it has so much more conflict and drama. And according to Westood9, the new Ain't It Cool source, the prequel idea was even more interesting than we would've thought.

"Smith is actually the one who developed the initial story. It took place several years before the original film and there were still pockets of survivors and the story centered around Smith interacting, bonding, and ultimately failing to save them. For months this was the story. Warner's didn't much care for it and Smith and [writer D.B. Weiss] eventually came on board and all parties agreed to change things up."

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