Every week, Netflix unveils its Top 10 lists for the week before, ranking TV shows and movies by viewership. It seems like the whole world had been preparing for the release of the zombie horror, 28 Years Later, by watching its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later, on Netflix. Actually, when I say «the whole world,» I mean places that are not the US. That’s because while 28 Weeks Later ranked No. 8 in Netflix’s Top 10 films for the week of June 16, its thanks to viewers in 36 other countries. The film is not actually available to stream on the platform in the States.
Don’t worry, though. If you’re itching to watch raging zombies terrorize a bunch of British people, you can catch 28 Weeks Later on Hulu and Disney Plus. (And after years of not being able to stream the 2002 film that started it all, 28 Days Later, you can now watch it free on Pluto TV.)
28 Weeks Later, which came out in 2007, is the follow-up to 28 Days Later. While Boyle, Murphy and the rest of the original cast didn’t return for the film, Alex Garland was a producer. The sequel picks up six months after the events of the first movie, 28 Days Later. Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, it stars Cillian Murphy as Jim, a bike messenger who awakens from a coma to discover that London has been decimated by a rage virus that has wiped out much of the population and threatens the remaining survivors.
Each film in the series depicts the aftermath of the viral outbreak that’s turning people into homicidal rage monsters known as «the infected» (a.k.a. killer zombies). 28 Years Later has earned a lot of hype thanks to the reunion of its collaborators, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter AlexGarland, and the fact that it’s been in development for over a decade.
While Boyle wasn’t involved with 28 Weeks Later (Garland produced it but it was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who co-wrote the script with Rowan Joffé, Enrique López Lavigne and Jesus Olmo), the film has an impressive cast that includes Jeremy Renner, Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle and Idris Elba, all fighting for their lives as a new batch of zombies assails them in the English countryside. I’ll let you debate which film is superior; it’s a hot topic online and with the third film out now, everyone has their own rankings.
If you haven’t caught 28 Years Later in the theater yet, now you can make a whole week of it and catch the entire trilogy in order. You might as well, considering there’s at least one more film in the series on its way — 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is slated for theatrical release next January.
