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Who Remembers When Will Smith Predicted 'Batman v Superman'?

During one scene of I Am Legend, the camera pans over Will Smith’s character, Robert Neville, to reveal a poster for Batman v Superman in the background of Times Square.

By Tom ChapmanPublished 6 years ago 2 min read
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Films and shows have a strange knack for predicting the future — Family Guy predicted Caitlyn Jenner's transformation, The Simpsons predicted Trump's presidential campaign and Space Odyssey predicted that we would eventually be using tablet computers. But for one of the most WTF (What The Future) moments, let's look at this year's blockbuster Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Back in 2007, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend gave us an eerie look into the future. During one scene of I Am Legend, the camera pans over Will Smith’s character, Robert Neville, to reveal a poster for BvS in the background of Times Square. Fast forward to 2016 and have just seen the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Legend's use of the BvS logo is one that is strangely close to the actual logo for the upcoming film.

Does Will Smith have psychic powers? Is he from the future? Is this why he hasn't aged since his Fresh Prince days? Maybe the 47-year-old was lining himself up early for his role as Deadshot in other Warner Bros. romp, Suicide Squad. Smith's appearance on the red carpet for Dawn of Justice has sparked rumors that he knew what he was doing all a long — we just call it cinematic irony.

In actual fact the film reference was an Easter Egg from Francis Lawrence's own mind. The writer of I Am Legend, Akiva Goldsman, had written an early draft of a Batman v Superman movie, but the movie never got made. The script was canned and Christopher Nolan took over the franchise... the rest is history, but the duo still wanted to reference it somehow. Lawrence told Collider:

We thought, ‘Hey, what movies would it be fun to have up on the screen when the plague hit?'

Neither party can remember where the logo came from, but Lawrence thinks it came from DC Comics’s Superman/Batman series from 2003. The best part is that Lawrence and Goldsman didn't even have permission from Warner Bros. to use a hybrid logo, but did it anyway. As Legend was also a Warner Bros. film, they managed to get away with it. Perhaps if Zack Snyder needed any help on BvS he could've asked Goldsman for some script advice?

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About the Creator

Tom Chapman

Tom is a Manchester-based writer with square eyes and the love of a good pun. Raised on a diet of Jurassic Park, this ’90s boy has VHS flowing in his blood. No topic is too big for this freelancer by day, crime-fighting vigilante by night.

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