Nearly 22 years after Danny Boyle shook up the zombie genre with 28 Days Later, the director makes a return to the saga of the infested with this week’s 28 Years Later. As the title implies, it’s been a long time coming.
After making future Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy a breakout star and earning over $70 million worldwide on a paltry $8 million budget, 28 Days Later earned a sequel, 28 Weeks Later. But by the time 20th Century Fox wanted to produce it, Boyle was off making his cult sci-fi film Sunshine. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Damsel) was recruited by Boyle to write and direct the film, which expanded the scope and polished the filmmaking with a studio sheen. But 28 Weeks Later didn’t go over well with audiences, and between negative reviews and meager box office, momentum for the would-be franchise was all but gone. Though over the years, Boyle was always quick to mention interest in coming back for a second sequel.
So why didn’t we get 28 Months Later?
When I ask Danny Boyle and 28 Years Later writer Alex Garland — who penned the original script as well — they can only laugh.
“Once we finish this trilogy,” Boyle jokes, nodding to current plans for not one but three 28 Years Later films, “[28 Months Later] will be the prequel.”
“It’s a trick George Lucas taught us,” Garland snarks. But there was a time when Months was absolutely on the table.
While Garland eventually wrote a script that was teased in the press as 28 Months Later, the timeline for producing such a movie never made a lot of sense. The issue started with Boyle and Garland’s working relationship, which imploded after the two worked together on Sunshine. In a recent interview with Empire magazine, Boyle described it as a “falling out” after clashing over how much needed to be explained to the audience.
“Sci-fi. Fucking Christ,” Boyle said. “You are really inventing the world in every single precious detail. I remember becoming obsessed with that. I wrote a prologue to try to explain it all and [Alex] said, ‘If you fucking put that in the film, I’m off.‘”
Still, the idea persisted. Even in 2007, around the release of Sunshine, Boyle was open to the possibility — even while being completely down on the idea of sequels.
“There is an idea for the next one, something which would move [the story] on. I’ve got to think about it, whether it’s right or not,” he told MTV. “I’m not particularly keen on franchises. I find it really depressing that they’re so successful. It used to be, when I started, that a sequel would only make 60 percent of what the original movie did. Now, of course, the sequels are much more successful than the originals. I’m more interested in doing originals. If you can come up with good enough ideas, people will come and see original films, rather than the rehash, you know?”
Boyle and Garland eventually reconciled when the latter began his own directing career with 2014’s Ex Machina. And as the story goes, around that time, they discussed the possibility of a second sequel to 28 Days Later. Cillian Murphy wanted in too. “Every time I do bump into Danny or Alex I always mention it,” Murphy said while doing press for 28 Days Later’s 20th anniversary in 2022. But at the time he conceded it would be tough to do 28 Months Later, considering he was 20 years older.
Garland and Boyle hinted in interviews throughout the mid-2010s that they had actually stumbled on to the hook that would lure Boyle back to the director’s chair for a sequel, but it was always in the context of a proposed 28 Months Later. Time may have had its way with the pair’s plans; between the acquisition of 28 Days Later studio Fox by Disney and the ultimate decision to independently produce a sequel (which was eventually sold to Sony Pictures), the process of bringing a 28 [TBD] to screen was slow and arduous.
Neither Boyle nor Garland were willing to share what, if anything, made it from drafts of the scrapped 28 Months Later into 28 Years Later, but the completed film seems to share a perspective with the original idea: Boyle wanted to make another movie set completely in Britain, that centered on a British family of survivors. 28 Years Later is exactly that, sidestepping the ending of 28 Weeks Later with expositional opening text.
Garland tells Polygon it was a relief to pivot to 28 Years Later: A large passage of time opened up all kinds of world-building possibilities and what-if questions to explore. And Boyle says it gave him the chance to do a movie that still felt like a totally original project versus “the rehash” he feared he would make coming off of 28 Days Later. But the director isn’t completely done with the past either: He confirms Cillian Murphy — as his 28 Days Later character Jim (or something else entirely?) — is a “very important feature of the trilogy.”
So maybe they did learn a few lessons from George Lucas after all. But don’t hold your breath for 28 Months Later.
