The big-budget adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic horror novel I Am Legend is set for a December release in the States, with Will Smith heading up the cast. The human cast that is….

Will Smith is apocalypse survivor Robert Neville - a scientist and the last man standing in the aftermath of a devastating man-made virus that has wiped out the population of New York, and possibly the rest of the world. Isolated, Neville searches for clues to the virus’s origins and a possible cure drawn from his immune blood. But he is not alone, for although nothing human survived the virus, there are others out there hunting him: the infected.

Constantine director Francis Lawrence’s post-apocalyptic sci fi horror film I am Legend, due to be released in the US on December 17, will actually be the third adaptation of Mathesons’s man-besieged-by-vampires concept. The first was 1964's The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, and the second was the more well-known Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man in 1971.

It is easy to see the appeal: Matheson’s novel crossed classic vampire lore with an Assault on Precinct 13-style siege drama, the novel chronicling Neville’s struggle to not only accept the end of the world as he knows it, but his attempt to maintain some kind of day-to-day existence after the sun goes down.

Smith’s involvement in the project brought it out of a long lull period. Warner Bros pictures had owned the rights to the novel since the 1970s, and the list of directors and actors sniffing around a movie adaptation reads like a Hollywood who’s who. In 1997 Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger approached Warner Bros, but were blocked by budget problems. Michael Bay and Will Smith tried later in 2002 but again the project stalled.

Fall 2005 saw the breakthrough with Lawrence assigned to direct a script re-written by Akiva Goldsman (who previously worked with Smith on I, Robot) that was based on a script written by Mark Protosevich over a decade previously (and had subsequently been tweaked many times).

A tie-in comic is planned by DC Comics, which will also branch out into an online format, featuring contributions from Orson Scott Card, Richard Christian Matheson (the author’s son), Bill Sienkiewicz, and screenwriter Mark Protosevich.

One thing that fans will not be getting is a Johnny Depp appearance. Rumours in summer 2006 that Depp was to have a starring role as a plague survivor were quickly denounced.

I Am Legend is released in the US on 17 December 2007 and in the UK on 4 January 2008.