It’s already been 12 years since Fox Atomic released 28 Weeks Later, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later. While the filmmaker wouldn’t return for the sequel, he is involved with the long-gestating third film; four years ago, Boyle said he’d be interested in returning to the director’s chair.
Set to be called 28 Months/Years Later, the project has been defunct for quite some time. Now, Boyle is reviving chatter in a new interview with The Independent where he revealed that he’s still working on the sequel with Ex Machina filmmaker Alex Garland, who wrote the 2002 original.
“Alex Garland and I have a wonderful idea for the third part,” he told the site. “It’s properly good.”
He continued: “The original film led to a bit of a resurgence in the zombie drama and it doesn’t reference any of that. It doesn’t feel stale at all. He’s concentrating on directing his own work at the moment, so it’s stood in abeyance really, but it’s a you-never-know.”
In 2015, Garland told IGN that they had “just started talking about it seriously.”
“We’ve got an idea. Danny [Boyle] and [producer] Andrew [Macdonald] and I have been having quite serious conversations about it so it is a possibility. It’s complicated. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why it’s complicated, which are boring so I won’t go into, but there’s a possibility.”
He added: “It’s more likely to be 28 Months [Later] than 28 Years. 28 Years gives you one more place to go. 28 Decades is probably taking the piss.”
It’s been four years since the last time there’s been talk. Boyle could have easily said the project is never happening, but insisted that there’s a good idea that he and Garland have been developing. Although, Garland has been on fire lately, so the idea that he’s going to buckle down to finish writing another 28 Days Later is proper insane. I think the takeaway here is that Boyle sounds committed to (eventually) bringing the trilogy to an end one way or another. We’ll just be here waiting patiently for 2030/2035.
