28 Years Later: Part III is on hold — and fans insist the films were never the problem
Danny Boyle says 28 Years Later: Part III is on the back burner. Why the Cillian Murphy finale stalled, from Bone Temple's box office to Garland's Elden Ring.
Fans waited 18 years for the infected to come back, and now the trilogy has stalled one film short. The people who actually saw The Bone Temple say the films were never what failed.
The third 28 Years Later film has officially joined the "maybe later" pile. At a BFI London Film Festival talk with Puck's Matt Belloni on 9 October 2026, Danny Boyle told the audience that 28 Years Later: Part III is "on the back burner at the moment". The script exists. The cash doesn't. "We just need money. But I hope it will," he said.
The cheeky part is the timing. On 30 September, at the Zurich Film Festival, Boyle sounded far more certain:
"'28 Years 3,' or whatever it ends up being called, will get made because people keep asking about it. Quite when I'm not sure, but there's a script – a very good script by Alex Garland."
— Danny Boyle, at the Zurich Film Festival
In the same conversation he promised "a lot of Cillian Murphy" and wondered whether the actor would still take his kit off, given that "he's got the Oscar now". Nine days later, the kit stays on indefinitely.
Where everyone went
Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later and both new films, is now writing and directing A24's adaptation of Elden Ring. "Alex has been off doing his own film, which is a huge project," Boyle said. So the creator of the series is making a video game film while his own finale sits in a drawer.
Boyle's own tabloid drama Ink, about Larry Lamb and the rise of The Sun, is one of the festival's headline galas, and even that was a slog to finance: "We found it very difficult to raise the money for this." Asked what comes next, Boyle named an Antarctica-set film. "That's the next priority," he said.
The trilogy everyone keeps asking about now queues behind a film set in Antarctica.
Sony has not commented. As recently as May, Boyle told JoBlo he hoped to shoot next year, explaining that the story is set somewhere in Britain "you can only film at certain times of the year".
Read more: About that 28 Years Later 3 hype — the new update is a downer
Why The Bone Temple sank
Then there's the box office. The first film did fine; the second arrived too fast and walked straight into a snowstorm:
- 28 Years Later (June 2025): a $30 million US opening and $151.3 million worldwide, on a $60 million net budget.
- The Bone Temple (January 2026): the franchise's most expensive film at $63 million, out seven months later. It opened to $15 million over a four-day US holiday weekend, short of the $20–22 million expected.
- Weekend two: down around 70% to $3.8 million, as a winter storm shut about 400 US cinemas.
The galling bit is that people who saw Nia DaCosta's film loved it: 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- CinemaScore. Fans on r/movies think it was mugged rather than rejected.
"Bone Temple got screwed. Releasing it so quickly after the first one caused some confusion... Then the second weekend had a massive winter storm that caused most of the Midwest theaters to close."
— a Reddit user on r/movies
The thread's most upvoted comment: "Crazy that it took so long to get a continuation, and now we're back in the same boat as before 28 years." 28 Weeks Later came out in 2007; the next chapter took until 2025. Murphy first played Jim in 2002. Jim outlasted the Rage virus. Outlasting a Sony spreadsheet may be harder.
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