The movie 28 Years Later is shaping up to be one of 2025’s biggest movie drops. The third installment of the “28” trilogy, it has been a long awaited sequel to the 2002 28 Days later and the 2007 28 Weeks later movies. With Danny Boyle is back in the director’s chair, teaming up again with Alex Garland, who wrote the original film, fans are excited to know how the trilogy will end.
Details are scarce, we know the main cast, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes, but the plot has been kept heavily under wraps, although there are some things we can surmise knowing the argument of the first two installments and the trailer that has dropped.
The trilogy begins a few days after a group of activists accidentally free an infected chimpanzee from a lab, causing a virus outbreak in Great Britain. From there chaos ensues as the infected individuals go into rampages infecting or killing anyone in their path. The second installment continues where the story ended, 28 weeks later, when the infection is beginning to die down because of military intervention from abroad and lack of resources for the infected to use to be alive.
SPOLIER ALERT: The ending of the second movie sees the virus being spread through the European continent instead of contained to Great Britain because of some travelers that went to France and continued to spread the virus.
From here, we can surmise that the virus took over the world and we might be faced with a post-apocalyptic world, but considering the fact that, according to Garland, the original version that he pitched was not at all the version of the movie that has been made, we might be in for a surprise regardless of what we believe.
The making of the 28 Years Later movie
While talking to GQ recently to promote his next film Warfare, Garland opened up about 28 Years Later and shared some background on how it all came together. He mentioned that the idea had been bouncing around for a while between him, Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and Peter Rice. “It had been talked about on and off between Danny, and Andrew [Macdonald], Peter Rice, and myself,” he said.
But the end result will not be anywhere close to the original pitch, as at one point, Garland had his own pretty out-there concept for the movie that did not make the cut. “At some point, someone else had a crack at writing a script, and I had a really strange idea about Chinese special forces arriving in the UK and making a subtitled film.”
This would have taken the franchise in a totally different direction, as it would have taken the focus away form the island and put it on the Asian continent, but since the last installment already took the focus to the European continent anything is possible.
The trailer they did go with to promote the movie has been a hit. Unlike many trailers nowadays it gives no clues as to the premise of the movie, but it does set the tone by using Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots.” That poem plays over bleak, haunting shots of a post-apocalyptic UK, 28 years after the original outbreak. It is gritty and emotional, showing the horrors people still face decades after everything went to hell. And for a minute, it even had fans convinced that Cillian Murphy’s character from the first movie, Jim, was back and infected.
To fan’s dismay, it was not him at all, just a background actor who happened to look a whole lot like him, but it did make us all wonder what other surprises are in store.