This is not Cillian Murphy, that’s been debunked.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are returning after 22 years to make 28 Years Later, though the original film, 28 Days Later, has remained one of cinema’s weirdest modern days stories.
The new 28 Years Later trailer from Boyle and Garland (they did not do 28 Months Later) is stunning, and is likely to be another instant classic of the zombie genre. Even this short spot is one of the most unsettling trailers I’ve seen this year. It’s out on June 20, 2025.
But as for 28 Days Later, a film you probably want to watch ahead of its release, you have been unable to, legally, in almost any format for a long while now. 28 Days Later is not on any streaming services for free, rent or purchase. New Blu-Rays are not for sale. The only way to watch it is to get a second-hand physical copy or…pirate it. Fortunately, that is about to change.
According to Sony itself, 28 Days Later will soon be available on digital. In a rather bizarre way to announce this, there is now a page set up where you can put in your information to be notified “when you can preorder the movie on digital.” So while it is coming back, we don’t know when that is. And you can…pre-order it? Bizarre. But at least it’s happening at some point. The sign-up apparently will also opt you in to getting marketing updates for Sony, so that’s sort of lame.
28 Days Later disappearing from existence exemplifies many people’s worst fears of the modern streaming era, that movies, even incredible ones, can somehow slip through the cracks and disappear entirely. Granted this is an especially unusual case, but it certainly validates some of those fears.
The reason this happened, you might guess, is because of a mess of rights issues. Disney lost the rights to the film, but 28 Weeks Later was financed by Searchlight, which became a subsidiary of Disney after it bought Fox, so that movie was still available. But the 28 Days Later rights stayed with Sony and they simply failed to make a deal with any streaming services to air it. Why this is has never been made clear, and the ability to “pre-order” the digital release of the film may imply it’s simply going to be available for digital purpose, rather than head to a streaming service like Netflix or Disney Plus. But we don’t know for sure.
This will no doubt happen some time before June, but I really wish Sony would come out and explain what exactly has been going on here for years, but no doubt they will not. Hopefully it stays online forever now.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.