28 Years Later might be the third entry in the horror series, but the moody film feels like it could be a standalone work – right up until its final moments.
The post-apocalyptic coming-of-age story from director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and writer Alex Garland (Civil War) plays with time and perspective, only revealing the importance of its first scene with a cliffhanger ending that sets up the next film in a new planned trilogy. If it’s not obvious: We are getting 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple in January 2026. And the first movie tees it all up.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for 28 Years Later.]
While most of 28 Years Later follows Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old leaving a quarantined island for the first time to hunt some infected, the film opens in the immediate aftermath of the Rage Virus outbreak with a group of terrified kids watching the Teletubbies. When the infected inevitably break in and start biting everyone in the house, one kid named Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) manages to flee into a nearby church where his vicar father has decided to embrace the plague as the fulfillment of divine will. The vicar gives his son a golden crucifix and welcomes the bloodthirsty horde with manic glee while his child hides beneath a baptismal font grate.
We see Jimmy again as an adult (played by Jack O’Connell of Sinners) when he rescues Spike from the hungry infected who’ve come to claim his fish dinner. Still carrying the crucifix, which he wears upside down, he’s also sporting a tiara, a tracksuit, and plenty of glitzy rings. Apparently, in the intervening decades, he’s become the leader of a cult that dress in matching apparel and fight the infected with impressive martial arts skills rather than the more pragmatic bows used by Spike’s people. Boyle says the look and character name were inspired by BBC host Jimmy Saville, who was accused of being a serial sex offender.
Jimmy’s story will be fleshed out in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which was filmed back-to-back with 28 Years Later and will be released on Jan. 16. 2026. Directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman) with a script from Garland, the film is named for the memento mori constructed by Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). In an IndieWire interview, Boyle said that both Kelson and Jimmy will be huge characters in that film alongside Spike, and that it will explore “the nature of evil.”
Expect Jimmy and his cult to be pretty twisted given they were almost assuredly responsible for the tied up and branded man left for the infected who Spike and his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) find on their hunt. Jimmy is also meant to be a manifestation of Garland’s views of the regressive ways people view the past, cherrypicking and misremembering elements.
Garland plans to write the script for a third film in the trilogy, which will be directed by Boyle. It will return to where the franchise started by focusing on Jim, the bicycle messenger played by Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later.
“You have to acknowledge the first film, but to a minimal degree, but we tried to make a standalone film in its own right,” Boyle told Polygon. “But Cillian, for instance, who’d be the most obvious way to make the thing feel continuous with the first film, is a very important feature of the trilogy — but not just yet.”