Key art from the official trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

‘28 Years Later 3’ Will Have ‘A Lot of Cillian Murphy’

September 30, 2026

Cillian Murphy turned up as Jim in the final scene of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple as a surprise, 24 years after he woke up in an empty London hospital. The third film is where he gets more than a scene. Danny Boyle says 28 Years Later 3 will have “a lot of Cillian Murphy in it,” and that Alex Garland has already turned in the script.

Boyle made the remarks at the Zurich Film Festival, where he was presenting his new film Ink. “’28 Years 3,’ or whatever it ends up being called, will get made because people keep asking about it,” he told Variety. “Quite when I’m not sure, but there’s a script — a very good script by Alex Garland… [It will have] a lot of Cillian Murphy in it.”

Director Danny Boyle, who will direct the third film in the new 28 Years Later trilogy — Danny Boyle in 2019. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

He attached one caveat about how much of Murphy is on offer. “Whether he’ll take his kit off anymore, that I don’t know. He’s got the Oscar now.”

$58.5 Million Is Why This Was in Doubt

The Bone Temple opened January 16 and finished with $58.5 million worldwide against a $63 million production budget. A sequel that does not earn back its costs in theaters is the arithmetic that quietly ends trilogies, and it is the reason anyone had to ask Boyle the question in Zurich at all.

Samson, played by Chi Lewis-Parry, in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) in Columbia Pictures’ *28 Years Later: The Bone Temple*. Photo by Miya Mizuno, courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Garland has written all three films in the new run. Nia DaCosta directed the middle chapter; Boyle is taking the finale himself. Beyond that he gave no date, and the film is not on any release schedule yet.

The Fifth Film About a 28-Day Virus

The count runs 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), 28 Years Later (2025) and The Bone Temple (2026). Boyle’s third picture would be the fifth entry in a franchise named for a 28-day incubation period, and Murphy has played Jim in exactly two of them.

Cillian Murphy, who plays Jim in the 28 Years Later films, photographed at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival — Cillian Murphy at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Jim’s reappearance was the last thing The Bone Temple did and the only thing in it that pointed forward. He survived the outbreak, he is raising a daughter, and the scene handed the trilogy’s closing chapter a lead it had been carrying in reserve since 2002. Murphy has been an executive producer on both of the new films, so he was never far from them. That is the door Garland’s script walks through.

Theatrical one-sheet poster for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — The theatrical one-sheet for *28 Years Later: The Bone Temple*. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Boyle used the same Zurich conversation to back Jack O’Connell, who played the cult leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal in The Bone Temple, as the next James Bond.

What Boyle offered in Zurich was a script and a reason, not a start date, which reads less like a film in development than one waiting on a studio to say yes. Murphy has an Oscar, a character he has played twice in 24 years, and Garland’s pages already in hand.

Vivian Thorne is a horror writer drawn to psychological horror, dark literature, and unsettling storytelling. She covers films, books, reviews, and opinion pieces with a sharp eye for what makes horror linger long after the final frame fades.