At least twice a week, we receive screener requests from distributors (it‘s the Mary Shelley branding of her "lost classic"). We always ask them how they heard about our production. I’m stunned to hear that the buzz up in the studios is that our film is positioned as the head-on "competitor" in the theaters for Warner Brothers I AM LEGEND blockbuster. Apparently, the studios in Hollywood have heard all about Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN and have come to some conclusions.

But, studios? Buzz? Theatrical competitor? Whoa! I’m not sure how that happened, or how anyone at the studios even heard about our movie yet, but it’s a huge, huge compliment. As thrilling as that is keep hearing, the simple facts are these: we have not even begun to market our product to theatrical distributors, cable, broadcast or home video distributors, no one. We’re not doing any pre-sales, and we're making no deviations from our timeline. All of the rights remain reserved until we have a finished product, expected out by November 2007. We are currently in post production, going for picture lock.

The reason I’m breaking silence on this is that I’ve heard from more than one insider that the people at the studio making I AM LEGEND have followed our progress on this site (probably dismissing our low-budget production as a non-threat) so I‘m taking this as an opportunity to say, why just own Coke when you can own Pepsi too? In movie terms, why enjoy revenues from just the Dracula franchise when you can also enjoy revenues from Frankenstein too? Although we don’t have Will Smith, Mary Shelley does have universal brand recognition, significantly more than Richard Matheson outside of the United States. Our product will obviously produce revenue when properly marketed.

Our two products aren’t competing products, they can easily compliment and boost each others sales within the same genre in exactly the same way as Dracula and Frankenstein. Just imagine promoting I AM LEGEND on THE LAST MAN previews on our DVD, and vice versa. Is there any more effectively targeted advertising than that? I’ll bet the advertising budget starts at 30 million. But consider what kind of return WB might make cross marketing another Last Man genre home video product on the I AM LEGEND DVD previews with a product that cost just a fraction of the ad budget to acquire. Cross marketing the two products could produce a two to three-fold return in WB home video sales against the cost of acquisition.

Our movie is way bigger than THE OMEGA MAN but not quite as big as I AM LEGEND (we didn’t have thousands of extras, only hundreds) so I think our movie may find a permanent home on video store shelves for the next 30 or so years. Being the first motion picture production of Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN positions our feature film right between those two titles because of the branding and the scope of our production. Why not see revenue when any of those three products are sold? It certainly has the potential to make it to theaters but what it won‘t ever do is compete against I AM LEGEND. What it will do is cross compliment both products, in exactly the same way that Dracula has always cross complimented marketing Frankenstein. It’s a no-brainer. Just consider the potential.

VFX shot of the highrise office towers of downtown Tucson before the nuclear blast. The downtown area was modeled in Lightwave 3D in very high detail.