Entertainment
Bone Temple’s Flop Should End Hollywood’s Most Annoying Trend
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
The moment Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury turned up after the credits of Iron Man was the moment that entertainment changed forever. Every film had to be part of a larger universe, with each one teasing that the next would be bigger and better. The natural end result of this trend has been studios filming multiple movies back-to-back and planning from the beginning that, no matter the audience reaction, this will be another epic universe of interconnected films.
The long-awaited 28 Years Later ran headfirst into both trends, ending with a tease for the second film in a trilogy, and then 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple fell flat months later when confused audiences rejected it as too much, too soon, and too confusing.
The Bone Temple Doesn’t Sound Like A Sequel
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up right where 28 Years Later leaves off and devotes its entire runtime to Spike (Alfie Williams) and the Jimmys, a strange gang based on the British personality Jimmy Saville (in the film’s timeline, Saville’s sex crimes were never exposed). The film itself is a great entry in the growing franchise by keeping the story’s focus tight on the group, which starts off as larger than you’d expect for a horror film, but quickly gets whittled down. It culminates in an insane sequence set to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast that proves Ralph Fiennes can do anything. The problem isn’t with the film, The Bone Temple is well worth watching, but the problem comes from Hollywood’s fascination with milking every aspect of every successful film before anyone knows it’s a hit or not.
Thankfully for everyone involved, 28 Years Later was a hit during the summer of 2025. It would have been awkward for the already filmed and edited sequel if the first film had crashed and burned. Unfortunately, the summer of 2025 was only a few months ago, and the general audience didn’t think 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was a sequel only six months later. Hollywood’s “everything is a franchise” hubris finally caught up with it, and the result was a truly unique horror film that earned less domestically than Tron: Ares.
2 Fast 2 Furious is a stupid name for a movie, but it makes it clear that it’s a sequel. M3GAN 2.0 was another disaster, but the 2 is right there. The Bone Temple doesn’t denote it’s a sequel, especially since the Bone Temple itself was a major part of the first film. It sounds like a director’s cut version of the first film.
Fans Rejected The Jimmy Gang Months Ago
Working against 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the first appearance of the Jimmys at the end of the first film. Watching a group of color-coordinated tracksuit-clad survivors ripping apart infected like post-apocalyptic Power Rangers was such a tonal shift from the rest of the film’s meditation on grief and death that it immediately turned off a part of the film’s fanbase. Which is unfortunate, because the cast and crew had a three-week break between wrapping one film and starting another back in 2024, long before the public reaction to the wild twist.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple earned $13 million domestically during its opening weekend and a total of $46 million, which isn’t bad, but it’s lagging significantly behind 28 Years Later. An estimated budget of $68 million means that director Nia DaCosta’s follow-up to The Marvels is again going to bring in a respectable sum for most films, but the budget kills it. Once again, the talented DaCosta was saddled with bringing the studio’s vision to life, no matter what the fans said they wanted.
The Bone Temple underperforming won’t stop studios from purposely stretching out stories into multiple movies, and it won’t stop the trend of filming movies back-to-back before anyone knows what the fanbase is going to latch onto. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple ends with another tease for the third, and hopefully, final film. Years of Marvel post-credit teases that have gone nowhere haven’t left audiences waiting for every film to promise a bigger, better sequel; it’s done the opposite, and now audiences roll their eyes out of annoyance. Studios need to cut their losses and go back to focusing on telling one great story before any other fan-favorite franchises fall victim.