If you’ve grown sick and tired of zombies on the big screen and Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die didn’t help any, you have Danny Boyle and Alex Garland to thank for it. The resurgence of zombie flicks really kicked off in 2002 with 28 Days Later, a new style for the genre that audiences responded to with a sizable box office and critical acclaim. A sequel, 28 Weeks Later, opened a few years later and wasn’t as well-received, but it was good enough to that talks began for another film, possibly titled 28 Months Later, although it never happened.
Boyle is out doing press for his Beatles-inspired musical comedy Yesterday, and the conversation turned to 28 Days Later. The director says he and Garland haven’t forgotten about the hit zombie franchise, and have a plan to return to it in the proper way…
“Alex Garland and I have a wonderful idea for the third part,” Boyle told The Independent. “It’s properly good.”
He added, “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.”
It’s unclear if he’s talking about 28 Months Later and if this is the same idea he’s been praising since way back in 2008. As late as 2015 Boyle and Garland were having serious conversations about a return, but nothing has come of it due to what the latter calls “complicated” reasons. It’s also unclear who would get behind the camera. Boyle directed 28 Days Later from Garland’s script, a working dynamic that proved very successful for both of them on numerous films. However, 28 Days Later saw new writers brought in while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo took over from Boyle. That didn’t turn out so well, and we should see Boyle and Garland take over once more. Garland has since become a top director in his own right with Ex Machina and Annihilation.
I was just talking about 28 Days Later with a friend last night, saying that it’s arguably my favorite of Boyle’s films right up there with Sunshine. Its premise is one that very closely resembles The Walking Dead. Cillian Murphy plays a man who wakes up from a coma only to discover the world has been overrun by zombie-like people infected with a strange virus. Along with a few others he must learn to survive in this new, increasingly dangerous and militarized world.
My gut tells me this movie never happens, though. Boyle has literally been saying the exact same thing for more than a decade, and with so much time passed is there really a desire for another?
