2003’s 28 Days Later was one of the harbingers of the surprisingly long-lived craze for stories about the shambling undead. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reimagined what zombies could be on screen, ditching the classic George Romero zombie for a faster, scarier and more vicious model.
The movie is now considered a minor modern classic and has gone on to be a big influence on The Walking Dead, World War Z and the Left 4 Dead video game franchise. The film was followed in 2007 by the Juan Carlos Fresnadillo-directed 28 Weeks Later, which wasn’t as good, but still provided its fair share of chilling moments as it explored the longer term impact of a zombie apocalypse. Since then, it’s all been quiet for this franchise, but now its dead flesh is showing ominous signs of life.
Danny Boyle has long been hinting that he has something in mind for the third movie, saying way back in 2007 that he had “an idea for the next one.” The brakes were put on that project due to rights issues though, with Garland explaining in 2010 that:
“When we made 28 Days Later, the rights were frozen between a group of people who are no longer talking to each other. And so, the film is never going to happen unless those people start talking to each other again.”
Well, it seems that whatever caused the dispute is now water under the bridge, as Boyle has revealed the following in a new interview in The Independent:
“Alex Garland and I have a wonderful idea for the third part. It’s properly good. 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.”
So, what could we eventually see? Perhaps 28 Decades Later might be a little far-fetched, but the obvious candidates to find out what’s going on in this world are 28 Months Later and 28 Years Later. Given the amount of time since the last movie came out, it might be best to go with ‘years’ just so we get a sense of time passing, but either way, more from the 28 Days Later franchise can only be a good thing.
