28 Days Later sequel could skip straight to 28 Years Later

It’s been over 20 years since director Danny Boyle’s groundbreaking zombie thriller 28 Days Later hit theaters in 2002. The movie introduced us to the terrifying Rage virus, which makes infected sprint as opposed to shamble towards their prey, breaking with zombies as they’ve been depicted for decades in stuff like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. There’s already been one sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which premiered a few years after the original.

Naturally, you’d think another movie would follow the theme and be called 28 Months Later, right? Well, enough time has passed that Boyle and writer Alex Garland think 28 Years Later is the most likely successor. “A few years ago, an idea materialized in my head for what would be really 28 Years Later,” Garland told Inverse. “Danny always liked the idea.”

Moreover, Boyle revealed that the idea is slowly maturing and becoming something that they can build into a movie. “So, we’re talking about it quite seriously, quite diligently,” he teased, adding that he’d be down to direct the threequel: “If he doesn’t want to direct it himself, I’ll be well up for it if we can execute a similarly good idea.”

What would 28 Years Later look like?

Currently, details about a third movie are being kept under wraps. We know absolutely nothing, except that it could take place 28 years after the original, which would mean it’s set around the year around 2030. It’s most likely that the movie will follow a new set of characters, similar to how 28 Weeks Later featured a totally different cast to the original.

28 Weeks Later ended on something of a cliffhanger which was never addressed further. In the final scene, the survivors took a helicopter over the English Channel to France, where infected surrounded the Eiffel Tower.

Alex Garland wasn’t totally satisfied with how the sequel turned out. Neither Garland nor Boyle were able to dedicate time to work on Weeks since they were tied up with other projects. But they did offer some help; Garland chipped in with some script rewrites. Even so, it seems too much damage was done. “I resisted [making a sequel] for a long time because there were things about 28 Weeks that bugged me,” Garland explained. “I just thought, ‘F*ck that. I’d rather try to write a different story in a different world.’”

Fast forward to today and it appears progress is being made on a new installment. Watch this space.

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