Danny Boyle has revealed that his cult sci-fi thriller Sunshine could have been the first part of a trilogy, if only it'd done a little better at the box office.
Starring Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, and Michelle Yeoh, Sunshine is set in the year 2057 in a version of the future where the sun is dying and the Earth is in danger of freezing to death. The movie, written by Boyle's 28 Days Later collaborator Alex Garland, follows a group of astronauts who are sent on a dangerous mission to reignite the Sun with a bomb.
Despite a positive critical reception and a now-cult status, the film made just under $35 million at the box office against a budget of $40 million when it was released in 2007. "The movie did no business at all!" Boyle joked in a new interview with Collider. If the movie had been more commercially successful, Boyle revealed that not one but two sequels may have followed.
"Originally, when we were doing it, Alex wrote two other parts," the director said. "It was supposed to be a trilogy… I mean, he only wrote an outline. It was a planetary trilogy. It was to do with the sun itself, with two other stories. What’s interesting is Alex has a natural instinct as a storyteller to want to tell these expanding stories, and that is why 28 Years Later wound up as a trilogy."
He continued, "I can’t remember it in enough detail. But there was an extraordinary idea in one of them. It’s kind of Elon Musk scale, even though he’s lost a lot of credibility. But it was interplanetary stuff, it had more to do with that… There’s no rich man in it. But the idea of looking outside and moving."
Boyle and Garland's next collaboration is 28 Years Later, the long-awaited third installment in the duo's post-apocalyptic horror movie series. Almost three decades after the outbreak of the deadly virus, a group of survivors have made a life on a heavily protected island, but a father and son soon discover what lurks beyond when they set out on a mission to the mainland. The cast includes Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, and Jack O'Connell.
28 Years Later arrives in theaters on June 20. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our picks of the rest of this year's best upcoming horror movies.
