10 Bleak Movies With Unexpectedly Happy Endings

4. I Am Legend

I Am Legend Will Smith
Warner Bros. Pictures

I Am Legend is considered to be not only one of Will Smith's best movies but also one of the best dark sci-fi movies in the past several years. Or, at least the first 93% of the movie is. The majority of this movie is about our main hero slowly coming to the realization that humanity is, well, outdated.

The horrifying zombie creatures that make up the various scares in this movie are slowly revealed to us, as they're revealed to the main character, to be just as, if not more human than the humans found in this story. Humanity has evolved, and unfortunately, that makes Will Smith's character the bad guy for resisting that evolution.

And then it all gets thrown out the window for a forced happy ending that paints the creatures as your normal run of the mill zombies, and Will Smith's character as a generic hero, rather than the tragedy we had been working with up till then. And this is why no one likes test audiences.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?