I Don’t Envy Nia DaCosta’s Task with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Announcing a major piece of franchise IP as the first entry in a trilogy is a tricky proposition; one rife with potential pitfalls. Will any priority be placed on each entry functioning as a satisfying, self-contained story if they’re beholden to the necessity of “setting things up” for the next film? Will the entire arc of the trilogy be planned, or at least sketched out in advance, if the chance to make all three entries is not assured from the start of the process? If the films are going to be directed or shot by different individuals, how much communication will they have in terms of standardizing elements of tone, artistry and theme? How much standardization do we want these films to have? These are the prompts rushing through my still-dazed head as I consider how exactly director Nia DaCosta is meant to take up the mantle of Danny Boyle in January’s upcoming sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

Taken as a whole, I quite enjoyed Boyle’s long-awaited third entry in his quasi-zombie series, even if it was leagues away from the film I was generally expecting after seeing its impeccably crafted trailers. This was not the expected story rooted primarily in the gritty survivalism of 28 Days Later, which utilized its emergent lo-fi digital filming aesthetic to project an uncomfortable realism in images of an abandoned London for traumatized post-9/11 audiences. Like its infected, 28 Years Later has evolved symbolically and visually, embracing a more evocatively surrealistic suite of imagery as it tells a fraught, fable-like coming-of-age story in almost episodic structure, the first and second halves of the film being effectively cordoned off from one another. It’s a surprisingly poignant and emotional depiction of a young man (Alfie Williams’ Spike) being forced to shoulder the mantle of parentified responsibility and the reality so often expressed by Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson within the Latin phrase memento mori: The inescapable truth that all things must end, which is coupled with the dual realization that we must live as best we can in the time allotted to us as a result. These themes are coupled with a surprisingly lyrical, heavily stylized visual palette, which makes for some of the film’s most breathtakingly unconventional imagery–I wasn’t expecting to watch Jamie and Spike run across the shallow water causeway under a sky blooming into purple nebulas and awe-inspiring cosmic lights, while pursued by an 8-foot Neanderthal “alpha” infected, but goddamn if I wasn’t thrilled watching it.

But it does beg the question: How do you make a film structured and styled so distinctly and unconventionally as 28 Years Later, and then hand off an immediate sequel (filmed back to back) to a different filmmaker? What kind of responsibility or charge has that second director–in this case, Candyman’s Nia Dacosta–actually inherited here? Is she meant to preserve the totally unique vibe that Boyle has conjured, or ditch it and make something just as distinct and personal, even though she’s inheriting the same characters and narrative, as the deeply perplexing, absurdist ending to 28 Years Later seemingly makes clear? Would it not have brought the project far more natural cohesion to simply have Boyle back in the director’s chair for each installment? Especially given that Boyle is reportedly meant to return for the as-yet-untitled and unshot third film in the series? Is there any way that DaCosta’s Bone Temple can avoid being the incongruent middle child of the series as a result?

We’ve seen within recent memory what it looks like when a big budget, ambitious IP trilogy ends up being entirely undone by a basic lack of coherent planning between the creatives tasked with shepherding each entry. It’s still difficult to accept that Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy was allowed to unfold in this manner, passed like a hot potato from J.J. Abrams to Rian Johnson and back to Abrams, with each director spitefully abandoning or reversing the creative decisions made by the former, leaving the end result as three disjointed films perpetually at war with each other’s core ideas. Somehow, Disney execs convinced themselves that a trilogy of three of the most expensive films ever made (with a cumulative budget of more than $1 billion) didn’t need a concrete plan, and could instead be piecemealed by each stubborn filmmaker, even when those writer-directors seemed to loathe each other’s contributions. A franchise like 28 Years Later is by no means in the same galaxy of commercial investment, but surely it’s safe for us to assume that the likes of Columbia Pictures have learned something from the lack of cohesion that afflicted a property like the Skywalker Saga, right? They’re not about to leave Nia DaCosta out to dry … right?

So with that said: In what way is DaCosta meant to approach her task? Would it be better to emulate, at least somewhat, the style that Boyle so iconoclastically embraces here? Or is it a better option to ditch those stylings entirely, even if it makes The Bone Temple clash stylistically with its predecessor released less than a year earlier, a film that will still be fresh in our minds when The Bone Temple arrives?

I’m tempted to say that only the latter is really a workable solution–that I hope DaCosta’s film is every bit as distinctly weird and unexpected as Boyle’s 28 Years Later–but at the same time, I’m not sure that’s a reasonable thing for me to expect or hope for. Nia DaCosta is, without a doubt, an emerging genre voice of some distinction after she thrillingly reinvented Candyman with her own modernized imagination, before subsequently being thrust into the bad situation that was the MCU’s tendency to drag down emerging talent to its monotone level in The Marvels. At the end of the day, though, DaCosta is still a relative newcomer to the commercial film world, especially in the shadow of a figure like Danny Boyle, a lauded Oscar winner who is one of the most widely admired and emulated U.K. filmmakers of his generation. Considering that her film will be bookended by Danny Boyle movies on both sides when the trilogy is complete, who could blame DaCosta if she rationalized that she ultimately had little choice but to show deference to a filmmaking inspiration like Boyle, by carrying forward the tone and style he just established? It makes you wonder: What kind of blessing did Boyle give or not give DaCosta to be individualistic in handling the central chunk of this greater story?

At the same time, I find myself wondering, how aware was Nia DaCosta even able to be when filming The Bone Temple of the overall artistic outline of Boyle’s 28 Years Later? If the two projects were filmed directly back to back, as they seem to have been, then what finished material or footage was DaCosta even able to familiarize herself with? Was she on set with Boyle for any of the 28 Years Later filming? Did the two have artistic strategy sessions in an attempt to hash out a shared throughline of artistic expression, or did she approach The Bone Temple with only a vague idea of what 28 Years Later would ultimately look like? Again, this seems like a nigh-impossible situation for DaCosta to be thrust into as an artist. How can you directly follow up an iconic director’s high-profile work, if you haven’t even seen his work yet? The presence of a different director of photography, Sean Bobbitt, who replaces longtime Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle, likewise seems to suggest a different visual intent.

It’s not that reasons don’t exist to be cautiously optimistic here. First among them is the presence of Alex Garland as screenwriter for the entirety of the (still theoretical) trilogy of 28 Years Later films–unlike the cautionary tale that is Star Wars, one would think that a shared writer overseeing any and all projects here should at least keep the overarching narrative on some kind of coherent footing, even if Garland’s contributions aren’t likely to be felt particularly strongly in terms of the film’s broader look and feel. Boyle is likewise a producer on The Bone Temple, and I have to assume that he wouldn’t simply fling DaCosta into the deep end of fandom in the same way that she was made into a sacrificial lamb by the MCU machine when The Marvels disappointed at the box office. But it’s still difficult to shake the lingering unease when considering other questions, such as asking whether The Bone Temple will be allowed to effectively stand on its own when it’s ultimately in service of a third movie that hasn’t been greenlit. If DaCosta’s entry sees a natural drop in box office–common among sequels released in fairly rapid succession–will the studio simply balk at producing the third entry, stranding the story in an incomplete state? And in that case, would it be Boyle or DaCosta who ended up shouldering the blame? Something tells us it wouldn’t be the Oscar winner.

Ultimately, this is just a subsection of the vast array of quibbles I continue to find myself circling since taking in 28 Years Later this weekend. Why, for instance, is the sequel subtitled The Bone Temple when that’s seemingly in reference to a location (Dr. Kelson’s area) that we’ve already explored in detail in the first film? Why did Garland specifically introduce a group of cultists seemingly inspired by disgraced British TV personality Jimmy Savile, when Cillian Murphy’s returning protagonist from the original 2002 film was already named Jim? Was DaCosta handed a screenplay involving this quirky group of antagonists reacting with rage and resentment that a more independent James doesn’t want to be sucked into their Jim-fold, no doubt objecting to their strict hairpiece guidelines? Does the unbridled zaniness of the final five minutes of 28 Years Later actually imply anything about the film we’ll see in theaters in January of 2026, or is that simply a garish fake-out?

It’s nice to know, at the very least, that we likely won’t have to wait very long for answers to some of these questions to begin leaking out–by the autumn, a marketing campaign for The Bone Temple will presumably begin forming, and we should be able to make an informed guess of what tack DaCosta has taken in what seems like an assignment fraught with difficulty. Here’s hoping that she can thread the needle, deftly landing somewhere between consumer expectation and gratifying artistic freedom. Her arrow is nocked; we pray it flies true.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.