After the trailer for “28 Years Later” broke all kinds of records on release last month, it felt inevitable that an announced but yet-to-be-filmed third film would get greenlit. Now Empire reveals, via Danny Boyle himself, that the trilogy-capper indeed will happen, and he’ll direct it. But Boyle won’t start shooting the film until after his upcoming zombie pic hits theaters in June.
The third film, still untitled, comes after “28 Days Later” and Nia DaCosta‘s “28 Days Later: The Bone Temple,” which hits theaters on January 16, 2026. Alex Garland returns to pen the film, as does producer Andrew Macdonald. Was a trilogy always Boyle and Garland’s idea to renew the series? No, but Garland explained their creative process expanded that way. “This is very narratively ambitious. Danny and I understood that,” said the multi-hyphenate. “We tried to condense it, but its natural form felt like a trilogy.” Macdonald added that it’s rare for a studio, Sony in this case, to bankroll a project of this scale in the UK. “You just don’t get to do a story on this scale in this country,” said the producer. “To do something in Britain that feels like it has [size], it’s great.”
Here’s what Empire revealed about Boyle’s first film: set 28 years after an initial outbreak caused much of the UK’s population to turn into rage-filled, flesh-eating zombies, the remaining inhabitants of the country are cut off from the rest of the unaffected global population. Boyle centers his story on a small band of survivors eking out an existence on the coastal Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, connected to the mainland only by a causeway the tide buries each night. “It’s a closed and necessarily very tight community,” Boyle said of the island’s inhabitants. “There are very strict defence laws, obviously, to survive that long in what is effectively an ongoing hostile environment. They’ve created a successful community, as they see it.” But when a rite of passage inland for a young member of the group goes wrong, their relative safety get thrown into chaos.
Garland approached Boyle with the story idea after years of brainstorming a new concept for the series. What worked for Boyle? The massive time jump from the previous two films. “It was a wholly different approach,” Boyle tells Empire. “It was about what that 28 years gives you.” The post-apocalyptic world Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell and more inhabit differs from the Cillian Murphy-led first film from 2002, or Juan Carlos Fresnadillo‘s 2007 sequel. As the only country affected by the virus, survivors in the UK forge a life of their own, caught in a hostile environment cut off from the rest of the globe. And some zombies are older now, too, which means the infected carry new problems for the remaining humans.
So when will the third chapter of the upcoming “28 Years Later” trilogy reach audiences? It’s a little over six months between Boyle’s first film and DaCosta’s follow-up, so maybe Summer 2026? If “28 Years Later” triumphs at the box office this summer, that’s a safe bet. And, no, despite reports to the contrary, Murphy won’t be back for the new trilogy; at least, not in the first two entries. “We wanted him to be involved and he wanted to be involved. He is not in the first film, but I’m hoping there will be some Jim somewhere along the line,” said Macdonald. For now, Murphy remains only an executive producer on the new films, but Macdonald hopes “we can work with him in some way in the future in the trilogy.”
