I Am Legend (2007)/Warner Bros. Pics
August 10, 2021, 11:51 am
Because this is the world we live in now, the screenwriter who produced the script for the film I Am Legend had to take time out of his day to address the rumor spreading around anti-vaxxer spaces that the COVID-19 vaccine turns you into the zombies from the movie.
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No, really, there are people who think that the vaccine that many millions of people have received with little more than some passing fatigue and arm pain will turn you into a fictional zombie creature from a Will Smith film.
And Akiva Goldsman had to publish a tweet letting everyone know that he made the whole thing up and did not get the idea by looking 14 years into the future when the vaccine for this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic was released.
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Fellow writer Marc Bernardin first responded to this nonsensical rumor with a bit of a despairing message, stating that anti-vaxxers who can’t tell the difference between fiction and real life are going to get us all killed. Goldsman then officially set the record straight.
“Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s. Not. Real,” he tweeted.
Others have also correctly pointed out that in the fictional movie which is not real, the zombies were created by a “genetically reprogrammed virus” and Will Smith cures them by developing a vaccine. But that plot point has been generally overshadowed by the fact that the conspiracy theorists somehow convincing Republicans to pass laws outlawing mask mandates and vaccine requirements think that a zombie movie they saw could come true.
Goldsman has not commented further on this strange turn his life took thanks to anti-vaxxers, but he did retweet an informative video about the dangers of the delta variant and why everyone should get vaccinated.
The news that anti-vaxxers think movies are real life came from a New York Times report on a local company that tried its best to get all of its employees to get the vaccine but still ended up with a few holdouts. One of them cited I Am Legend and the rumor that it’s kind of real but different in a really convenient way for their narrative as a reason to refuse the shot and became the focus of every normal person’s attention.
Vera Bergengruen, the TIME correspondent who initially boosted this detail in the article, did some of her own research on just how many people think the Will Smith zombie movie could come true. Unfortunately, she found that there are thousands of people engaging with this absurdity, many of them on “pro-Trump and QAnon forums.”
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If you haven’t been on these forums because you’re a fan of reality, you probably didn’t know that this rumor has been circulating among conspiracy sites since near the beginning of the pandemic to the point that they made Will Smith himself feel bad about it.
This news is so ridiculous to the vast majority of people that it may actually be bringing them together. Even those who are not fans of Goldman’s work are expressing their sympathies for him right now.
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Hang in there, Akiva.
*First Published: August 10, 2021, 11:51 am
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