I Am Legend's Francis Lawrence is in line to direct The World Without Us, a feature adaptation of a non-fiction book by Alan Weisman. Mark Protosevich, who wrote Legend, is collaborating with Lawrence once again as a screenwriter on the project.
The book is a bestseller, despite telling the depressing yet somehow fascinating story of how the world would look after humanity have disappeared: how the landscape would change, how wildlife would react and how the vast organism that is the planet would respond to the disappearance of the beings that have infested its surface.
A film version, however, would tell a feature story "buttressed" by the book's hard science, and tell the story of an event that leads to man's disappearance. Please stop having flashbacks to The Day After Tomorrow; we're sure this will be totally different.
It does, however, have strong echoes of I Am Legend, especially given that the book spends a considerable whack of its time focusing on New York, which the pair so memorably de-humanised and wildlifed-up in that Will Smith film.
The hope is that Protosevich will write the script before tackling the Oldboy remake for Steven Spielberg, but it'll still be a couple of years at least before we see this, so there's time for the memories of I Am Legend to fade just a little.