I Am Legend was a film that came out in 2007 starring Will Smith. It was pretty popular, and made quite a bit of money (almost $600 million worldwide) and was talked about for quite some time. As you know, that movie is set in New York City after a virus has wiped out most of the population. Will Smith’s character Robert Neville is immune to the virus, and spends the movie trying to find a cure. With all that is going on in the world involving Coronavirus, the movie has recently come back into the spotlight, and Smith apparently feels responsible for some misinformation going around about COVID-19 – because of I Am Legend.
The star has decided to debunk some of the claims that are going around from that movie, as there’s quite a bit of misinformation out there. In an hour long video with Red Table Talk, Smith spoke about it.
“I wanted to do this because, in 2008, I made I Am Legend. So I feel responsible for a lot of the misinformation.”
The actor continued:
“My character was a virologist so I had an opportunity in my preparation for the role to go to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and there was a basic foundational comprehension of viruses and viral pathogens that I developed and it really changed my life and how I looked at the world. There’s basic concepts that people do not understand.”
He added:
“Imagine our local hospital can handle 40 respiratory patients at one time and under normal circumstances, 40 respiratory patients for that hospital is a lot… If 50 people show up in that hospital at one time to get 40 beds, now you have 10 people in critical condition that aren’t going to get help and your mortality rate shoots through the roof. That’s the idea of overwhelming the system.”
Hopefully something like that happened in I Am Legend doesn’t happen to us, but in the meantime it’s important to point out that – it was just a movie – and should be treated as such.