28 Days Later director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have finally reunited to make a sequel to their zombie (or, if you prefer, infected people) movie classic. As we reporter earlier this year, this sequel is set up at Sony, is going to be called 28 Years Later – and it’s meant to launch a whole trilogy of 28 Days Later sequels. In fact, when producer Andrew Macdonald confirmed that filming on 28 Years Later had wrapped back in August, he followed that up by saying that they were about to start working on the second chapter in this trilogy. Boyle directed the first one, then for the second film he passed the helm over to Candyman and The Marvels director Nia DaCosta. The sequel, 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple, wrapped production in October. 28 Years Later is set to reach theatres on June 20th, 2025, and 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple will follow six months later, on January 16, 2026. But what about 28 Years Later Part 3? Who will be directing that one, and when will it start filming? According to Empire, Boyle is likely to return to the helm for the trilogy capper, which won’t go into production until after the first movie is released, so the filmmakers will have the chance to see how audiences respond to it.
Garland wrote the screenplays for 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple, and is expected to write the last entry in the trilogy as well. While we don’t have any information on what happens in The Bone Temple, cast member Ralph Fiennes (Conclave) revealed some details on 28 Years Later: “Britain is 28 years into this terrible plague of infected people who are violent, rabid humans with a few pockets of uninfected communities. And it centers on a young boy who wants to find a doctor to help his dying mother. He leads his mother through this beautiful northern English terrain. But of course, around them hiding in forests and hills and woods are the infected. But he finds a doctor who is a man we might think is going to be weird and odd, but actually is a force for good.“
In addition to Fiennes, the cast of 28 Years Later includes Jodie Comer (The Bikeriders), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (The Fall Guy), Alfie Williams (His Dark Materials), and Erin Kellyman (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). It has also been said that 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy returns “in a surprising way.”
In the original film, Murphy played bicycle courier Jim, who wakes up from a coma to find himself in an apocalyptic England that’s overrun by people who have been infected by a rage virus. Boyle and Garland went through several endings for 28 Days Later before landing on the one movie-goers saw in theatres – and that ending was the only one where Jim survived. So he’s still out there, ready to live through another rage virus nightmare 28 years later. As The Hollywood Reporter previously noted, “The 2002 film grossed $82.7 million globally and spawned a sequel, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, though Boyle and Garland were only nominally involved as executive producers.”
Empire gives some more information on the plot, revealing that Britain’s straggling survivors (the rest of the globe remains relatively unaffected, leaving the UK to fend for itself) have learned to live in a full-on post-apocalyptic world. Here, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Jamie, Jodie Comer’s Isla, and their 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) are part of a community on Holy Island, aka Lindisfarne, connected to the UK mainland by a causeway only briefly accessible when the tide recedes each day. It soon comes time for young Spike to take a rite-of-passage trip beyond the safety of Lindisfarne, to open his eyes to the true state of the nation. Needless to say, things don’t go to plan.
Boyle told Empire that the characters live in “a closed and necessarily very tight community. There are very strict defence laws, obviously, to survive that long in what is effectively an ongoing hostile environment. They’ve created a successful community, as they see it.“
Garland said, “This is very narratively ambitious. Danny and I understood that. We tried to condense it, but its natural form felt like a trilogy.“
Thanks to their deal with Sony, each of these new films will be receiving a theatrical release and will have budgets in the $60 million range. 28 Years Later has a budget of $75 million. Boyle and Garland are producing 28 Years Later with Bernie Bellew, original producer Andrew Macdonald, and Peter Rice, who was the head of Fox Searchlight Pictures when that company backed 28 Days Later. Murphy is executive producing.
Are you looking forward to the 28 Years Later trilogy, and are you glad to hear that Danny Boyle is likely to direct 28 Years Later Part 3? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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