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Arash Amel has been hired to write a screenplay for I Am Legend 2 for Warner Bros. Will Smith is on board to produce through his Overbrook Entertainment shingle, with the potential once again to star.

Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote and produced I Am Legend, also will return as a producer.

The 2007 horror thriller starred Smith as the last surviving human in a New York cityscape overrun by monsters that survived the plague that killed most of humanity.

It is unclear how the storyline will be developed in the new project since Smith's character, Robert Neville, perished at the end of the first film. The film is not being called a prequel, which had been rumored for the past few years. But clearly Warner Bros sees more room to roam on a film that grossed $584 million worldwide.

Smith won’t commit until the script is ready and nobody has heard yet where I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence stands on the whole thing. The other quandary is this: If it isn’t a prequel, how to get past Smith’s character’s demise at the first film’s end? These of course are semantics in the tentpole game.

Smith produced Fox's recent release This Means War, and he stars in the Sony sequel Men in Black III, which hits theaters in May.