The Forced Ambition of a 28 Years Later Film Trilogy

In modern Hollywood, simply bringing a blueprint for a successful motion picture to the table is nowhere near enough to actually get that film made. The promise of a potential hit movie? Insufficiently ambitious for the c-suite. If this project is going through a major Hollywood studio, we need to think bigger than that. We need shared universes; we need legacy sequel character appearances; we need not just one but multiple sequels lined up from the get-go, each ready to spin off into their own unending series. We need to build IP! Why even bother making a film, unless you can rattle off three or more of them? Who cares if this approach makes the actual films suffer, due to the way it almost can’t help but turn each into little more than an advertisement and justification for the next? Audiences, after all, have been so thoroughly trained to crave a steady drip of the familiar that surely they’ll simply beg for more of whatever they’re given, right? You’ll have to forgive the cynicism that has infected my frame of mind here, but it’s all I can think about when I imagine a project like director Danny Boyle’s upcoming trilogy of 28 Years Later movies.

Yes, a trilogy. A trilogy of zombie-adjacent films–because lest we forget, the “infected” of the series aren’t quite traditional, Romero-style undead zombies, though the structure of the movies are undeniably zombie cinema–that follow up on Boyle’s deeply influential 2002 original 28 Days Later, which was penned by writer-turned-director-of-distinction Alex Garland. Said trilogy will reunite the pairing in earnest (they worked tangentially but not directly on the lesser 28 Weeks Later), at least for the first film scheduled for June of 2025–the curiously titled second entry, 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple is reportedly being helmed by Candyman director Nia DaCosta, although all three films will presumably have screenplays credited to Boyle and Garland. But still: Is this really a concept that demanded a trilogy of new movies, conceived and shot one after another? Is that decision likely to help each individual film stand on its own, or simply yoke them together like a team of plow animals hauling Columbia Pictures’ bottom line in the direction of lucrative merchandising opportunities? Was anyone clamoring for 28 Days Later to get the David Gordon Green Halloween trilogy treatment?

We have simply seen all too many recent examples of how this style of overly ambitious, franchise IP-building tends to turn inevitably toward vapid, creatively bankrupt results. From the era of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy onward, this kind of excessive content-stretching has become cemented in the standard Hollywood playbook: Take an idea that might be compelling on its own, and then water it down and stretch it out to the point that it can no longer hold together and completely disintegrates before your eyes. We’ve seen it in aborted cinematic universes, from would-be auteurs like Zack Snyder and his pretentious, bloated Rebel Moon epic, or Green so losing control of the wheel in his Halloween films that he ended up somehow introducing a brand new central protagonist/antagonist in the third film of a trilogy via Halloween Ends, throwing aside the Strode women who had ostensibly been the narrative focus of the reboots. Thank God someone took the keys to The Exorcist away from the guy, rather than letting him swerve drunkenly through another two movies there as well.

Granted, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are not David Gordon Green, as I imagine they would probably want someone to point out. And there are legitimate reasons for cautious optimism, when it comes to whatever they’re planning for 28 Years Later. Like most horror geeks, I have a soft spot for Boyle’s original, a lean and vicious film that upended so much rote zombie convention as it reinvented the format for the post-9/11 anxiety of the 2000s. I’ve written about 28 Days Later for Paste, and ranked it at #4 all time in the genre in our list of the 50 best zombie films of all time. Garland, for the record, has said in interviews that he conceived the entire trilogy at the same time, which one would think should at least lend it some kind of narrative cohesion–although Green said the same thing about his schizophrenic Halloween movies, so who the hell knows? They’ve certainly attracted plenty of talent; you can’t deny that–in addition to a returning-in-some-capacity Cillian Murphy, you’ve also got Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Jack O’Connell and Ralph freakin’ Fiennes of all people in the first 28 Years Later installment, which is about as good a foundation as one can hope for in your long-delayed zombie project. Perhaps Boyle feels hungry for a hit with potential blockbuster-type appeal, in his first film since 2019’s treacly Beatles jukebox fantasy Yesterday? It certainly reads as the most “widespread commercial appeal”-type project of Garland’s writing career, in comparison with the likes of Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men or even A24’s bombastically marketed but ultimately cloistered Civil War.

It’s simply a bit difficult, though, to believe that a writer of the likes of Alex Garland, a filmmaker who has never written a sequel to one of his own movies in the past, suddenly woke up one morning with inspiration in the form of not just his first ever sequel, but three additional sequels to one of his films. Does that instinctively feel more like a concept that would come from the mind behind Annihilation, or the minds of studio bean counters? Does it seem organic, or does it seem forced by the economic imperatives of franchise filmmaking in 2024?

This is not a move that one can authoritatively say will negatively impact the quality of those 28 Years Later films, but it is a mode of filmmaking we have seen result in some of the weakest franchise storytelling of recent memory, as individual films are reduced to having little function beyond providing grounds to sow the seeds of still more stories in an endless cycle devoid of true payoffs. Case in point: As reddit users speculating about the film’s newly released poster observed, the name of Cillian Murphy is curiously absent. Given the modern imperative of IP and nostalgia-based filmmaking to prioritize any connection to the well-loved original film, one would think that the presence of that film’s protagonist would be the biggest thing marketers would want to highlight for 28 Years Later … unless of course Cillian Murphy’s character of Jim is “being saved” for the second and third installments, which is a legacy sequel trope so well established at this point that it’s now bordering on cliché. I know you’re already imagining the closing sequence of the film, as Jim appears in glory to save our protagonists and allow them to bask in his Legacy Character aura. I look forward to seeing his survivalist beard.

Rather than making the primary function of a new 28 Days Later sequel the laying of groundwork for two additional sequels, imagine if Boyle and Garland simply approached the project with an objective of making the best possible standalone film, and let response to that film dictate future steps for this franchise? Do we really even have to use a word like “franchise” in the first place, when talking about sequels to an original that was visually defined by its lo-fi, pioneering digital cinematography aesthetic? Would it be so awful to prioritize the quality of individual films, rather than the many-headed hydra of cinematic universe building? Why does it feel like the starting position of the proverbial cart has been relocated, so it’s now perpetually in front of the horse?

It should go without saying that everything I’m fretting about here is purely conjectural, in the case of 28 Years Later. Perhaps Boyle and Garland will defy every conceivable expectation for this sort of franchise filmmaking, and are even now toiling away on what will be regarded as a trio of modern horror classics. Maybe Garland wrote three separate screenplays that aren’t even directly related to each other, documenting different arenas of life in a post-apocalyptic world like some kind of Irish-accented World War Z. Maybe I’m wrong about absolutely all of it–or maybe poor response to a first 28 Years Later will force heavy rewrites of second and third installments before the follow-ups are then canceled or shuffled off to the graveyard of streaming services. Unfortunately, I know which seems more likely to me, and in recent memory it’s rarely the cynics who have been forced to eat crow.

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