Posted in: Movies, Sony | Tagged: 28 years later: the bone temple

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – Nia DaCosta Had One Script Request

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple director, Nia DaCosta, explained how a complete script helped improve the entire experience, but she did request more infected.

People were happy when word came down that we were getting another film in the 28 Days world, but then they announced it was a trilogy. A  trilogy announcement right off the bat isn't always a good thing because sometimes movies fail to connect with audiences, financing gets pulled, and suddenly, we are left with a permanent cliffhanger because someone jumped the gun. There is still a chance that 28 Years Later and its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, will do that, but we are absolutely getting two of the three movies because the second one was shot immediately after the first.

It's another Alex Garland script, but now director Nia DaCosta is stepping behind the camera. We have bare bones (see what I did there) information about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple so far, and we probably have a couple more months before anything is released, but we did get to hear about the experience from DaCosta. She was speaking at an event for the Edinburgh International Film Festival (via The Hollywood Reporter) and explained how Garland's tight script really made all the difference, but she did have one request.

"Making the 28 Years Later sequel was one of the best filmmaking experiences I've had," DaCosta, director of The Marvels (2023) and Candyman (2021), said. "One of the issues I had with Candyman and Marvels was the lack of a really solid script, which is always gonna just wreak havoc on the whole process. But Alex Garland hands you a script, and you're like, 'This is amazing.' You don't really have to change it, although I did, I basically asked for more infected. [Laughs.] That was, like, my big contribution."

People who were a bit lukewarm on the first movie tend to cite the first half as being much stronger than the second, and while they are entitled to their wrong opinions, one of the reasons that people like it is because we see so much of the infected. So saying that she wanted more might be the thing to get people who were on the fence about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple to give it a chance.

There is a concern coming into something like this that DaCosta would be expected to try and emulate Danny Boyle or not have much input in terms of casting or locations, but it turns out she had a lot more freedom on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple than one might expect. DaCosta explained, "I inherited an amazing cast, then I was given the leeway to cast the rest of the film. There were a couple of locations I inherited. I was given the leeway to develop all the other locations. Some of it overlapped, like the character Samson — Danny and I would collaborate a bit on the look, but at the end of the day, Danny shoots so different from the way I shoot."

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is locked and loaded for January 2026, but Sony and everyone else have been pretty quiet about whether or not that third movie is going to materialize. Maybe they want to see if the box office for the second film is stronger than the first. Horror tends to do really well in January, and we can hope that whatever numbers it does is good enough that we'll be able to see this trilogy through to the end.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – Cast List, Release Date

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, stars Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O'Connell, Ralph Fiennes, and Cillian Murphy. It will be released on January 16, 2026.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!