‘I Am Legend’ writer recalls people walking out during dog death scene

Writer Akiva Goldsman has had a career full of highs, including winning the Oscar for his script for 2002’s A Beautiful Mind and the success of 2005’s Cinderella Man — but I Am Legend was less well received. One part of it was really loathed.

He remembers people walking out of theaters during a scene of the 2007 film in which one of the main characters, who happens to be a dog, is killed.

“I Am Legend never tested well because we killed Sam. People walk out when that dog dies,” Goldsman told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I get it. I love dogs. Never more walkouts in anything I’ve done than when that dog died.”

The 2007 Will Smith movie is about the sole survivor of a human plague. Everyone else is either dead or infected with a virus that’s turned them into monsters.

Smith’s character, Robert Neville, spends much of the Francis Lawrence-directed film with only his dog, a German Shepherd named Sam. But after his beloved partner is attacked, Robert holds Sam in his arms and even sings to her, before noticing that she’s now sick too. Her eyes have become wild and her teeth sharper. When she suddenly begins to growl and bite at him violently, the camera closes in on Robert’s face as he strangles the dog.

The audience hears the dog struggling and sees a heartbroken Smith looking away from what he’s doing. He tears up at the end of the scene, and he still can’t look as he moves the dog aside.

Commenters on YouTube video of the scene said it “ranks right up there with killing Old Yeller” and that it still had them crying in 2024.

Smith told THR that a meeting the movie’s team had with the head of the studio behind it, Warner Bros., did not go well either.

“We walk in and — almost like from a sitcom — Alan Horn has four giant pictures of the most gorgeous German Shepherds behind his desk,” Smith recalled. “He loves dogs. And he is telling us the story that he just lost one of his German Shepherds. We’re like, ‘Oh no. Oh no.’ Akiva says, ‘Alan, Will has something he wants to pitch you.'”

After the studio — predictably — took issue with the plan to kill Sam off, Smith noted that Goldsman was the one who found a solution. He suggested a “stage play.”

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“And what happens in the shot is you just pan off, and the whole scene is just played on my face,” Smith said. “You hear the sound of the paws, the nails scratching on the floor until they slow down and stop. It’s super painful, but the audience doesn’t have to suffer it.”

And that’s what they did.

Even with that brutal scene, I Am Legend was a success at the box office, according to Box Office Mojoearning $585.4 million globally.