Those waiting to see Cillian Murphy in a fifth “28 Days Later” movie — call it “28 Years Later Part III” — will have to get used to waiting. At a recent appearance at the London Film Festival, director Danny Boyle said quite clearly that the project was “on the back burner at the moment.” The continuing saga of the fast-zombie apocalypse has begun to shamble
Boyle, of course, helmed the original “28 Days Later” back in 2002, and returned to the series for its third film, “28 Years Later,” in 2025. He noted at LFF that another “28” film still requires financing.
Boyle also said that he would need screenwriter Alex Garland to participate, and Garland is currently busy with another movie. “Alex has been off doing his own film, which is a huge project,” Boyle said. Garland wrote the screenplays for every film in the franchise except “28 Weeks Later,” and his current movie is the big-budget video game adaptation “Elden Ring,” which he’s writing and directing for A24. That’s due in theaters on March 3, 2028.
/Film has been paying close attention to the “Elden Ring” movie’s production, and we are impressed that it boasts one of the best casts ever for a video game movie. The budget is reported to be north of $100 million.
As for Cillian Murphy, he played Jim, the main character in the original “28 Days Later,” and he returned to the series for a brief uncredited cameo in 2026’s “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” In a moment fans had been waiting for, we learn that Jim is surviving the zombie apocalypse, having settled into a comfortable life in his home, teaching his daughter history and politics and occasionally shooting zombies.
The 28 Days Later saga so far…
So far, we can only speculate if Murphy will actually return for a fifth “28” movie. Deadline claims that Cillian Murphy is “in talks” to appear, but the term “in talks” is hardly conclusive.
No one could have predicted that Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” would have become the decades-long franchise that it has. The original film was released in 2002 into a grim post-9/11 milieu, tapping into the public’s fears of widespread urban destruction. It was shot on crunchy digital cameras, which was a novelty at the time, and it was a huge hit, making almost $83 million on a scant $8 million budget. The film began with Cillian Murphy’s character, Jim, awakening from a brief coma to find that England had, 28 days earlier, suffered a zombie apocalypse.
Murphy did not appear in the 2007 follow-up “28 Weeks Later,” directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. That film was also a hit, making over $72 million on a $15 million budget. The series then went into hibernation until 2025, when “28 Years Later” was released. (It seems Danny Boyle couldn’t wait until 2030, when 28 years would have actually passed since the original.)
When the trailer for “28 Years Later” dropped, it sported a shot of a lanky, sickly ghoul that kinda sorta looked like the Jim character, leading many fans to ask if Cillian Murphy was a zombie in the trailer. The truth was that the resemblance was a coincidence, and that the sickly zombie was played by an actor named Angus Neill. As we learned in the Nia DaCosta-directed 2026 follow-up “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” Jim is alive and well.
