The third 28 Years Later film has a finished script and no money behind it, Danny Boyle said Saturday while accepting the Deadline Legend Award at Contenders Film Los Angeles. That gap, a completed screenplay sitting next to an empty production account, is the reason a trilogy capper with a ready-made ending still has no shooting date.

“Alex has written a fantastic script. Seriously, he’s written a fantastic script, so we’ve got to raise the money to make it,” Boyle told Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. onstage at the DGA Theater. Cillian Murphy, Boyle added, “he’s up for it, and it’s a fantastic part,” because “Alex has written this fantastic part for him.”

The part already exists onscreen, just not with Murphy’s dialogue attached yet. His Jim turns up in the closing minutes of Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which Sony released Jan. 16. Boyle has promised the payoff matches the setup, saying the third film closes the circle “in a way that even Chris Nolan might admire, actually, because it’s perfect” (a comparison Boyle volunteered without anyone asking, which is its own kind of confidence).

Boyle has been saying some version of this for a year. At Zurich in late September he said the sequel “will get made because people keep asking about it,” with “a very good script by Alex Garland.” By BFI London on Oct. 9 the project had slid to “on the back burner at the moment,” partly because Garland is busy writing and directing A24’s Elden Ring adaptation, and “we just need money.” Back in May, Boyle told JoBlo he had hoped to shoot “next year” after running out of time on a location that only cooperates during a certain season.

By the numbers:

  • 28 Years Later opened to $30.0 million domestic in June 2025 and finished at $151.3 million worldwide.
  • The Bone Temple opened to $12.5 million over three days in January and closed at $58.5 million worldwide.
  • That sequel’s net production cost ran $63 million, meaning the worldwide gross did not clear the budget.
  • Deadline logged a 56% domestic opening drop between the two films, well past the 10% slide from Bad Boys for Life to Ride or Die.

What this probably means: Sony isn’t walking away from a script Boyle calls finished and a star who keeps saying yes, but it also isn’t writing a check off a sequel that lost money on paper. Deadline reported in December that the studio was moving forward with Murphy in talks, with no comment from Sony, and nothing since has functioned as an actual greenlight. The studio held an option on the third film rather than committing to it when it won the trilogy rights, and it is still exactly that: an option, not an order. It’s the same negotiating posture playing out over at Amazon MGM, where Robert Pattinson’s Bond deal reportedly wants fewer films for more money before a studio commits to a start date of its own. Murphy, for his part, has been ready for months: “Hope so! I’m ready anyway,” he told The Times, as Bloody Disgusting noted.

Boyle’s other piece of Saturday business was Ink, his Murdoch tabloid drama that opened the Venice Film Festival and reaches select U.S. theaters Dec. 11 before streaming on Netflix Jan. 8. He confirmed the U.S. version restores epilogue headlines that British libel law strips from the U.K. cut, including The Sun’s “The Truth” headline blaming Liverpool fans for Hillsborough. “We have these redacted versions, but know that we’re in America. We’ve got it in there,” Boyle said, framing it as a legal protection the U.K. simply doesn’t extend (a rare case of American exceptionalism paying off for a British filmmaker).

Boyle closed with the line that explains both films better than any studio synopsis. A French journalist once stood up at a Paris Q&A and told him, “All your films are exactly the same.” “Ever since then I’ve accepted that she’s absolutely right,” Boyle said. The hero facing odds that look impossible and clearing them anyway describes 28 Days Later, it describes Ink’s newsroom underdogs, and now it describes the finale itself: the ending is written, the star is cast, and the obstacle left standing is one Boyle has never had to write his way through before.