User Research is a Waste of Time
The 2007 post-apocalyptic horror movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, had a bizarre ending. Humanity has been destroyed irreparably by a virus that turns humans into strange vampire creatures that fear sunlight. Robert Neville is a researcher who spends his days alone, attempting to study these creatures and find a way to turn them back into humans through diseases. However, experiment after experiment ends in failure, with the subjects he captured dead on his table.
After spending the entire movie attempting to save humanity, his home is overrun by these Darkseekers, who find his basement laboratory. A young woman and girl he rescued previous are in the house, and Will Smith uses a grenade to blow himself and the Darkseekers to smithereens, saving two of the last humans.
However, for those that read the book, this ending was bizarre and meaningless. The reversal is that the Darkseekers aren’t the monsters, Neville is. He abducts them while they sleep, takes them to his basement, and kills them. To them, he’s the monster. This ending is far more nuanced, and in the book the Darkseekers take his final subject from him while he realizes that his walls are covered in the photos of the hundreds of subjects who died at his hands.
Why was this changed?
