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an hour ago
- Entertainment
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Review: '28 Years Later' is a triumphant return, one of the scariest films of the year
"I need a shower and a lot of CBD." Putting it lightly, this was my instant message reaction to my colleagues leaving the cinema after 28 Years Later. Fingernails bitten to hell, I was a film critic shooketh to the core after seeing director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland reunite almost 28 years following their horrifying, groundbreaking, genre-disrupting 2002 film 28 Days Later. Since this series launched its grisly, running zombies, wildly popular series like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, and celebrated films like Train to Busan, satisfyingly filled the undead landscape onscreen. But Garland and Boyle bring fresh scares and existential dread, reminding audiences of the legacy their 2002 hit wrought. SEE ALSO: Should you watch '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later' before '28 Years Later'? One of the most unrelenting and scariest films of the year, 28 Years Later deserves the largest screen and sound system you can find — and serious guts. Almost three decades later, we're so back(bone). Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) find their mettle tested. Credit: Sony Pictures Since the Rage Virus-infected doomed the United Kingdom in 28 Days Later, the country has been left to fester in its own pétri dish of irate contagion for about 30 years. Survivors are left to fend for themselves, with no international aid in sight. In fact, European quarantine boats patrol the surrounding seas making sure Britain knows where its own damned perimeter is (the word "Brexit" does not come up in this film, but come on…). In this doomscape, a small community has fortified an island off the coast of England, protected from the undead by the tides, sturdy walls, and a wealth of traditional grassroots design (thanks to production and costume designers Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh). Key resources for "Holy Island" lie on the mainland, a place deemed a rite of passage for younger residents to visit, including 12-year-old Spike (a solemn, raw performance from newcomer Alfie Williams). There's just one rule: If you leave and don't return, no one is allowed to venture across the causeway and rescue you. While his mother, Isla (an exceptional Jodie Comer), lies undiagnosed with illness and enduring her own private hell, Spike and his father, Jamie (an intense and sweary Aaron Taylor-Johnson) venture to the mainland for some father-son bonding and find nothing awry at all. Everything's peachy! Yeah, this is a 28 Days film, you know it's not. On the mainland, Spike and Jamie find their mettle tested in myriad dreadful ways. As expected, these rolling English hills are flush with infected, bloodthirsty humans, some of whom have unexpectedly evolved into new variations including the petrifying "Alphas". But there's smoke on the horizon, with the mystery of this ever-burning fire tempting Spike's curiosity further from the safety of his island home. You'll want to be back on that island pretty damn quick. Credit: Sony Pictures As a zombie film following in the footsteps of one of the most celebrated, brutal, and barbarous horror films of the 2000s, 28 Years Later holds nothing back on the violence scale, tween protagonist be damned! Boyle and Garland pull more than one skull-attached spine out of the hat throughout the film, throwing explosive blood spatters across television sets playing the Teletubbies, and teasing a mountain of skulls looming ahead, each moment a visceral strike for the viewer. This dizzying onscreen violence is bolstered by Boyle's signature brand of disruptive filmmaking. In one of the most striking sequences of the film, Boyle and editor Jon Harris take what might be a simple scene of Spike's first moments on the mainland and turn it into a frenetic, splintered montage. Intercut with father and son marching across an abandoned beach is a barrage of archival footage of child soldiers, clips from Laurence Olivier's 1944 Shakespeare adaptation Henry V (a movie "conceived as a wartime morale-booster" for British audiences during World War II), and the urgent, desperate voiceover of British writer Rudyard Kipling's 1903 war poem "Boots," which was also used in the film's riveting trailer. SEE ALSO: 20 of the best British horror films It's a distressing, abrasive, political sequence promising horrifying violence, shattered innocence, and national collapse. Even if you can't place the references in the footage you can feel the dread. At the film's start, Boyle has you both unsure and knowing full well what's to come, and it ain't good for Spike and his family. Uh, hey... Credit: Sony Pictures Doyle reteams with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who employed a famously rogue use of digital camcorders for both extreme close-ups and lonely wide shots in 28 Days Later. His new innovation is a mix of cameras that include a flotilla of 20 adapted iPhone 15s to create a bullet-time effect on some moments of pivotal violence, recalling the mind-blowing effect in The Matrix. Using these handheld devices all rigged up, Mantle deploys both distorted and awe-inspiring camera angles using Boyle's beloved sprawling 2.76:1 widescreen aspect ratio. Vile close-ups of the infected slurping away on various fleshy business deliver all the juicy disgust of Dennis Quaid eviscerating prawns in The Substance. However, Mantle also offers magnificent and terrifying wide shots of our protagonists roaming about the English countryside, akin to those incredible shots of Cillian Murphy wandering through an empty London in the first film. Such a wide frame urges us to recognize how exposed the survivor is in this feral terrain, the constant threat from a grisly death could be behind any tree or over the horizon — or, most terrifyingly, on the horizon. And supporting such fear is the superb sound design from Young Fathers. It's honestly hard to tell where the diegetic sound starts and ends. Credit: Sony Pictures Besides the stalking Alphas, 28 Years Later has another villain in Young Fathers. The Scottish hip-hop trio does not appear in the film, but they bring their signature experimental style to a hypnotic and merciless score that functions as an omnipresent threat. Their soundtrack simultaneously hums like a revving vehicle, flickers like a crow pecking at remains, shrieks like a human pursued by some grotesquerie, and echoes like an unidentified beast caterwauling into the night. With such sinister sounds, the verdant peace of the English countryside is pulverised, and also by the guttural screams of the livid undead. It's honestly hard to tell where the diegetic sound starts and ends, a state that becomes perilous when it comes to the film's outrageous bombardment of effective jump scares. It's a deeply affecting experience, the score and foley functioning as symbiotic beings, with one often indistinguishable from the other and forming one living, breathing entity. Thudding footsteps run parallel to booming drums, screeches and squawks blend with plucked strings, amalgamating into one out-of-body wall of sound that's impossible to escape. It all feels doomed, like the end is extremely fucking nigh — and yet Boyle finds a path of hope in the most unexpected place. In a landscape heaving with zombie apocalypse media from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us, 28 Years Later manages to declare its footing as an original monster. Magnificently shot, ruthlessly edited, and outrageously scored, it's a rambunctious, grisly, human tale of survival. Boyle and Garland, with their impeccably talented team and a magnificent cast — led by the young and wondrous Williams — manage to both connect their original creation with the present and forge a terrifying new landscape, one that will stress you out and make a meal of your own fingernails. 28 Years Later his cinemas June 20.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Did you survive that '28 Years Later' chase scene? It was just as tough on the actors.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Years Later is full of terrifying moments, scenes in which the end is extremely f***ing nigh. However, one scene early in the film takes the cake as Scene Most Likely to Propel Your Heart Into Your Throat. We're talking about Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) and their encounter with the evolved variant of infected, the Alpha. SEE ALSO: Should you watch '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later' before '28 Years Later'? These super-strong male zombies are near-unbeatable, with improved speed, agility, and intelligence over their infected brethren, whom they can command in a single horrible screech. During Spike's first excursion to the mainland, the father and son see a colossal Alpha looming on the horizon, and the next 12 hours are spent battling his legions of infected. "In the movie, you've gone for an interesting day out," Taylor-Johnson told Mashable. "Father and son have gone out to the mainland, he's going to show him the infected and see who they can hunt and kill, and it gets worse and worse, their situation, so the stakes definitely get very scary." However, it's the final chase, when Jamie and Spike are on the home stretch, with the tide lowering enough for them to cross the all-important but extremely narrow and long causeway to Holy Island, that the Alpha finally gives chase. Reader, it's one of the most frightening scenes you'll see all year, our protagonists scrambling through shallow water with the thundering Alpha on their heels, and Young Fathers' distressing score sending your heart rate sky high. "It was very intense. When you watch this movie, my exhaustion as Spike is real," Williams said. "The amount of takes it took was exhausting, wasn't it? I mean, you had to literally drag us through the water." "Terrifying, because the Alpha's like seven-foot-tall, so his stride would meet our every two," said Taylor-Johnson. "When we were out in the scene, it felt real, like we were being chased by the Alpha," said Williams. Hard same. 28 Years Later is out now in cinemas.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
28 Years Later director Danny Boyle reveals unexpected 'nightmare' of filming NAKED zombie scenes for the horror movie starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes
Director Danny Boyle has admitted that it was a 'nightmare' filming naked zombie scenes for the highly acclaimed movie 28 Years Later due to one challenge. Danny, 68, stepped back into the director's chair to helm the 'terrifying' horror, written by Alex Garland, 23 years after the pair's first film, 28 Days Later, hit cinemas. After the long-awaited film hit screens, Danny reflected on the challenges he faced while filming the movie, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes. He revealed they needed to take extra care not to have 'naked' actors on the set because they had strict rules in place to protect the film's child star, Alfie Williams. Danny told PEOPLE: 'I mean, if you're recently infected [with the zombie virus], you'd have some clothes, but if you've been infected for a long time, the clothes would just disintegrate with the way that you behave 'We never knew [about rules governing nudity on set when there's a child present] going in, it was a nightmare.' In order to still film scenes featuring naked zombies while adhering to the safeguarding rules, Danny revealed the actors had to wear prosthetics. 'Interestingly, because there was a 12-year-old boy on set, you're not allowed for anybody to be naked, not really naked, so they look naked, but it's all prosthetics,' he shared. 'So it's like: ''Oh my God,'' so we had to make everybody prosthetic genitals.' Danny said he was keen to push boundaries with the elements of nudity and gore in the film, and he's glad studio bosses were supportive of his plans. He added to Variety: 'I think one of the wonderful things about horror is that you're expected to maximize the impact of your story. Everybody wants to do that with a drama, with the romance, whatever. 'But with horror, it's obviously gonna be brutal, some of it. What we loved was setting it against an innocence that's represented by the various children in it, and also the landscape, the beauty of the landscape, the nature. 'Having those two forces stretches your story as far as you can go, if you maximize them.' The first-ever movie of the series, 28 Days Later, followed Jim (Cillian Murphy), who awakes from a coma to discover Britain has been plagued by a terrible pandemic known as the Rage Virus, which turns those affected into murderous zombies. Although he didn't star in the second instalment and won't be in the new release, Cillian will make a brief appearance in the upcoming fourth instalment - 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The fourth film features Danny once again as a producer while Nia DaCosta directed, and it has already been shot ahead of its planned January 2026 release. However, the Trainspotting moviemaker hopes to be back in the directing chair once again if a fifth final movie is given the green light. The series was created by Alex Garland, 55, who wrote the screenplays for all the films except for the second instalment, 28 Weeks Later. Critics have already weighed in on the third zombie horror movie in the franchise, 28 Years Later, and it has received rave reviews. Two decades on from the 2002 original, which saw a deadly virus plague London, the new movie finds a group of survivors living on the secluded island of Lindisfarne. Rotten Tomatoes has handed the movie an impressive 94 per cent critic approval rating after rounding up the thoughts of more than 91 film reviewers. The Daily Mail's Brian Viner was incredibly impressed after watching the series' latest gory instalment, dubbing the movie the 'best post-apocalyptic horror-thriller film I have ever watched'. He wrote: 'With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic survivalist horror-thriller film I have ever seen. Which sounds like limited praise, yet it's a much more crowded field than you might think.' Robbie Collin in The Telegraph handed 28 Years Later a rave review, with the critic scoring the 'terrifying' horror movie five stars out of five. 'Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour - very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 - to undercut the ambient dread,' he wrote. 'And flashes of Arthurian fantasias and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree_ serve as regularly nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle ty with the notion of a 21st century British national myth.' The film also received five stars from The Times critic Ed Potton, who hailed Jodie Comer's 'impressive as always' performance. The journalist wrote: 'Is this the most beautiful zombie film of them all? It's hard to think of another that combines such wonder and outlandishness with the regulation flesh-rending, brain-munching and vicious disembowelment.' The BBC 's Caryn James gave the highly-anticipated film four stars out of five as she dubbed Ralph Fiennes's performance 'scene-stealing'. '28 Years Later is part zombie-apocalypse horror, part medieval world building, part sentimental family story and - most effectively - part Heart of Darkness in its journey towards a madman in the woods,' she wrote. 'It glows with Boyle's visual flair, Garland's ambitious screenplay and a towering performance from Ralph Fiennes, whose character enters halfway through the film and unexpectedly becomes its fraught sole'. Empire also awarded 28 Years Later four stars out of five, with journalist Ben Travis writing: '28 Years Later is ferocious, fizzing with adrenaline. The mainland thrums with a pervasive sense of immediate danger; when the infected arrive (and, do they arrive), it is breathlessly tense.' Reviews in The Guardian and The Independent were slightly more critical, however, with journalists scoring 28 Years Later with three stars. Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: 'A little awkwardly, the film has to get us on to the mainland for some badass action sequences with real shooting weaponry - and then we have the two 'alpha' cameos that it would be unsporting to reveal, but which cause the film to shunt between deep sadness and a bizarre, implausible (though certainly startling) graphic-novel strangeness.' While The Independent 's Clarisse Loughley wrote: 'Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle's still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.' 28 Years Later has become the best horror ticket pre-seller of 2025, with the film expected to gross around $30million in its first weekend. 28 YEARS LATER: THE REVIEWS The Daily Mail (FIVE STARS) Rating: With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic horror-thrill I have ever seen. The Times (FIVE STARS) Rating: Jodie Comer is impressive as always in the latest instalment of the post-apocalyptic series The Telegraph (FIVE STARS) Rating: This transfixingly nasty zombie horror sequel, starring Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, is Danny Boyle's best film in 15 years The Evening Standard (FIVE STARS) Rating: Jodie Comer, young Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes have a monsters' ball in this supercharged third outing for the 28 Days Later series BBC Culture (FOUR STARS) Rating: Alex Garland and Danny Boyle have reunited for a follow-up to their 2002 classic. It has visual flair, terrifying adversaries and scene-stealing performance from Ralph Fiennes. Empire (FOUR STARS) Rating: The sequel we needed is both the film you expect, and the one you don't. There's blood, but also real guts and brain and heart - visceral cinema soaked in viscera. The Guardian (THREE STARS) Rating: This tonally uncertain revival mixes folk horror and little-England satire as an island lad seeks help for his sick mum on the undead-infested mainland. The Independent (THREE STARS)
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Entertainment
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International Insider: '28 Years Later' Arrives; Landmark Netflix-TF1 Deal; NHK At 100
Another week down, Insiders, and it was a hot one in Europe. We had journalists in France and Spain (at two separate events) to gather up the top stories from the continent, while in the UK, the zombies returned, angrier and scabbier than ever. Sign up to the newsletter here. '28 Years Later', A Threequel Arrives More from Deadline BBC Hits AI Startup Perplexity With Legal Threat Over Content Scraping Concerns BBC's BAFTA-Winning Doc Series 'Once Upon A Time In...' Turns Eye To Middle East Danny Boyle Says He Would Never Make Oscar-Winner 'Slumdog Millionaire' Now Amid "Cultural Appropriation" Concerns Worth the wait: To me, it feels like just yesterday watching Cillian Murphy wander around empty London streets in hospital scrubs in 28 Days Later. It wasn't though – it was 23 years ago and I'm just showing my age. No doubt, however, that the love for Danny Boyle's zombie horror franchise has lasted all that time, as proven by the noise around the premiere of the third instalment, and the first since 2007's 28 Weeks Later. 28 Years Later had become the second-most watched horror trailer in history well before Boyle, writer Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald debuted it in this week in London at a world premiere in Leicester Square – and all the signs are that it's cutting through. Our social media guru Nada and Breaking Baz were on the red carpet to hear from the likes of Boyle, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, along with Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, Tom Rothman, who tipped us that the film will make a star of 14-year-old lead Alfie Williams. The story is set nearly three decades after the rage virus escaped a biological weapons laboratory and brought down society, in a film that our critic Damon Wise called a 'particularly scathing' commentary about 'Brexit Britain and its little-islander mentality.' Reviews have been pretty good, with some criticisms about the tone, pacing and ending, and its Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at 92%. You can go ever deeper by listening to Anthony D'Alessandro catch up with Boyle on our Crew Call podcast, where they discuss the long journey getting the film to screen and why the Slumdog Millionaire director won't be directing all three of the planned modern-day 28 trilogy. Anthony also noted Thursday in his box office round-up that 28 Years Later is tracking for a global start of around $56M. Netflix The Aggregator 'A new kind of partnership': Big platform news this week came out of Cannes Lions, where Netflix and French commercial network TF1 announced a potentially market-altering partnership. In part borne out of the friendship between TF1 CEO Rodolphe Belmer and Netflix's top brass, the companies unveiled a 'new kind of partnership' that sees five linear TF1 channels and 30,000 hours of on-demand content streaming on Netflix. To this point, Netflix has shown little interest in aggregating linear services – or any rival services, for that matter – but analysts have pointed out that the Netflix-TF1 relationship is a special case that has already seen them create Netflix's first daily soap in France. However, there's a sense this is the start of something bigger, as our analysis of the development showed. Truth is, global streamers need to attract older, linear-minded viewers and traditional players need the leverage and access to younger viewers of streaming services. 'Diagonal integration and co-operation' is what the big brains over at Ampere Analysis are calling it. You heard it here first. NHK At 100 Earthquakes and giant squid: Japan's NHK turned 100 this year and there has never been a better time to celebrate the role of public broadcasting. Good thing, then, that we landed an exclusive interview with President Nobuo Inaba, who detailed how the challenges facing pubcasters today may differ from a century ago, but the battles remain the same. In the 1920s, it was the Great Kantō earthquake that compelled the need for a public broadcaster, while today it has become the flood of disinformation driven by social media from which the public needs saving. Only public broadcasters can battle through the noise, Inaba argued, as he called for greater global collaboration and more shows for young people. Of course, public broadcasters enjoy nothing more than a celebration and a 100th birthday lends quite the excuse. In NHK's case, a series of special programmes have been airing through the year, including a documentary titled Neo-Japonism and anime adaptation Cocoon. Pressed on his favorite NHK show of the century, Inaba went a bit curveball by opting not for critically-acclaimed drama or doc, but for a natural history series made with Discovery, which captured the world's first video images of a giant squid. Dive deeper. Big Week For BBC Phillips gets Moore responsibilities: The race to succeed Charlotte Moore at the BBC has ended – and the biggest job in British TV commissioning is staying in-house. A month after Deadline had revealed acting Chief Creative Officer Kate Phillips was the frontrunner, the BBC rubber-stamped the appointment, and into a new era we go. She called the job 'one of the best roles in the business at an incredible organisation,' and it's clear she's got a vision of where she wants to take the UK's biggest public broadcaster. With a background in unscripted, those in drama and comedy are understandably watching closely, but it's worth noting they did the same when the Left Bank Pictures-bound Moore became Director of Content in 2016, thanks to her past in documentary. Fair to say her tenure went more than okay. That's one big headache for BBC Director General Tim Davie fixed, but there's migraine of a problem over at BBC News, where a PwC consultant has been drafted in to steer an internal review into bullying and misconduct allegations on flagship show Breakfast, which Jake first revealed in this shocking report in April. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. From CineEurope To Cuenca's Conecta Slate of play: The U.S. studios had their game faces on and film slates at the ready at CineEurope in Barcelona, Spain, this week. The annual event drew its regular industry crowd, and Nancy Tartaglione was on the ground gathering up the biggest and best of the news. Lionsgate returned after sitting 2024 out, sprinkling some magic dust in the form of Now You See Me: Now You Don't and confirming Nancy and Matt Grobar's scoop that Glenn Close and Billy Porter have joined the cast of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The studio was followed by Sony showing the first 28 minutes of 28 Years Later, Universal touting new Spielberg and Nolan projects, Warner Bros playing 30 minutes of July tentpole Superman, Paramount confirming Meet the Parents 4 and Disney teasing Toy Story 5 during a presentation that culminated in a James Cameron tribute to Jon Landau. Following the fun, Nancy and Anthony revealed the global box office is red hot, with Gower Street predicting a $12.4B summer. Over 300 miles away from Barcelona in the quiet city of Cuenca, I touched down for Conecta Fiction & Entertainment, the annual Spanish TV industry get-together. Nothing quite as splashy there, but reps from Max and Lupin maker Gaumont Television France gave their views on some live issues, as boiling hot temperatures gave way to biblical floods in the mountainous locale. Read the news from Cuenca here. The Essentials 🌶️ Hot One: The BBC has greenlit Twenty Twenty Six, a successor to comedy series W1A and Twenty Twelve, with Hugh Bonneville reprising his role and Chelsey Crisp, Paulo Costanzo and Stephen Kunken among a blended UK-U.S. cast. 🌶️ Another One: Martin Compston and Aimée-Ffion Edwards are leading the cast of The Revenge Club (w/t), which has Paramount+ UK and Ireland, Gaumont UK and Fremantle attached. ☘️ One for luck: Webtoon manwah Teenage Mercenary is being adapted as a TV anime series by Japan's Line Digital Frontier. ⛑️ Saved: Ireland's Playhouse Studios has acquired the assets of UK post house Lipsync, which went into administration last month. Most staff have been retained. 🔭 In focus: Filming Italy Sardegna, the annual Sardinian TV fest that kicked off yesterday. Diana also spoke to festivals specialist Tiziana Rocca in this interview. 👨🏻⚕️ Doctor, doctor: Russell T Davies has poured more fuel on the fire over the future of his BBC and Disney+ sci-fi series Doctor Who, saying, 'We don't know what's happening yet.' 5️⃣0️⃣ Fiddy: Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson has taken his 50 Cent Action Channel overseas for the first time. 🦁 Heart of a Lions: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine launched a Gen Z label, Sunnie, at Cannes Lions. 🤝 New roles: Lookout Point co-CEOs Laura Lankester and Will Johnston hopped over to A24's UK team. 🏆 Winners: Swedish drama Vanguard, Germany's One Day in September and CW series Good Cop/Bad Cop took home Golden Nymphs from the Monte-Carlo TV Festival. Jesse Whittock wrote this week's Insider. It was edited by Jake Kanter. Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More 'Stick' Soundtrack: All The Songs You'll Hear In The Apple TV+ Golf Series 'Stick' Release Guide: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
International Insider: '28 Years Later' Arrives; Landmark Netflix-TF1 Deal; NHK At 100
Another week down, Insiders, and it was a hot one in Europe. We had journalists in France and Spain (at two separate events) to gather up the top stories from the continent, while in the UK, the zombies returned, angrier and scabbier than ever. Sign up to the newsletter here. '28 Years Later', A Threequel Arrives More from Deadline BBC Hits AI Startup Perplexity With Legal Threat Over Content Scraping Concerns BBC's BAFTA-Winning Doc Series 'Once Upon A Time In...' Turns Eye To Middle East Danny Boyle Says He Would Never Make Oscar-Winner 'Slumdog Millionaire' Now Amid "Cultural Appropriation" Concerns Worth the wait: To me, it feels like just yesterday watching Cillian Murphy wander around empty London streets in hospital scrubs in 28 Days Later. It wasn't though – it was 23 years ago and I'm just showing my age. No doubt, however, that the love for Danny Boyle's zombie horror franchise has lasted all that time, as proven by the noise around the premiere of the third instalment, and the first since 2007's 28 Weeks Later. 28 Years Later had become the second-most watched horror trailer in history well before Boyle, writer Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald debuted it in this week in London at a world premiere in Leicester Square – and all the signs are that it's cutting through. Our social media guru Nada and Breaking Baz were on the red carpet to hear from the likes of Boyle, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, along with Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, Tom Rothman, who tipped us that the film will make a star of 14-year-old lead Alfie Williams. The story is set nearly three decades after the rage virus escaped a biological weapons laboratory and brought down society, in a film that our critic Damon Wise called a 'particularly scathing' commentary about 'Brexit Britain and its little-islander mentality.' Reviews have been pretty good, with some criticisms about the tone, pacing and ending, and its Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at 92%. You can go ever deeper by listening to Anthony D'Alessandro catch up with Boyle on our Crew Call podcast, where they discuss the long journey getting the film to screen and why the Slumdog Millionaire director won't be directing all three of the planned modern-day 28 trilogy. Anthony also noted Thursday in his box office round-up that 28 Years Later is tracking for a global start of around $56M. Netflix The Aggregator 'A new kind of partnership': Big platform news this week came out of Cannes Lions, where Netflix and French commercial network TF1 announced a potentially market-altering partnership. In part borne out of the friendship between TF1 CEO Rodolphe Belmer and Netflix's top brass, the companies unveiled a 'new kind of partnership' that sees five linear TF1 channels and 30,000 hours of on-demand content streaming on Netflix. To this point, Netflix has shown little interest in aggregating linear services – or any rival services, for that matter – but analysts have pointed out that the Netflix-TF1 relationship is a special case that has already seen them create Netflix's first daily soap in France. However, there's a sense this is the start of something bigger, as our analysis of the development showed. Truth is, global streamers need to attract older, linear-minded viewers and traditional players need the leverage and access to younger viewers of streaming services. 'Diagonal integration and co-operation' is what the big brains over at Ampere Analysis are calling it. You heard it here first. NHK At 100 Earthquakes and giant squid: Japan's NHK turned 100 this year and there has never been a better time to celebrate the role of public broadcasting. Good thing, then, that we landed an exclusive interview with President Nobuo Inaba, who detailed how the challenges facing pubcasters today may differ from a century ago, but the battles remain the same. In the 1920s, it was the Great Kantō earthquake that compelled the need for a public broadcaster, while today it has become the flood of disinformation driven by social media from which the public needs saving. Only public broadcasters can battle through the noise, Inaba argued, as he called for greater global collaboration and more shows for young people. Of course, public broadcasters enjoy nothing more than a celebration and a 100th birthday lends quite the excuse. In NHK's case, a series of special programmes have been airing through the year, including a documentary titled Neo-Japonism and anime adaptation Cocoon. Pressed on his favorite NHK show of the century, Inaba went a bit curveball by opting not for critically-acclaimed drama or doc, but for a natural history series made with Discovery, which captured the world's first video images of a giant squid. Dive deeper. Big Week For BBC Phillips gets Moore responsibilities: The race to succeed Charlotte Moore at the BBC has ended – and the biggest job in British TV commissioning is staying in-house. A month after Deadline had revealed acting Chief Creative Officer Kate Phillips was the frontrunner, the BBC rubber-stamped the appointment, and into a new era we go. She called the job 'one of the best roles in the business at an incredible organisation,' and it's clear she's got a vision of where she wants to take the UK's biggest public broadcaster. With a background in unscripted, those in drama and comedy are understandably watching closely, but it's worth noting they did the same when the Left Bank Pictures-bound Moore became Director of Content in 2016, thanks to her past in documentary. Fair to say her tenure went more than okay. That's one big headache for BBC Director General Tim Davie fixed, but there's migraine of a problem over at BBC News, where a PwC consultant has been drafted in to steer an internal review into bullying and misconduct allegations on flagship show Breakfast, which Jake first revealed in this shocking report in April. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. From CineEurope To Cuenca's Conecta Slate of play: The U.S. studios had their game faces on and film slates at the ready at CineEurope in Barcelona, Spain, this week. The annual event drew its regular industry crowd, and Nancy Tartaglione was on the ground gathering up the biggest and best of the news. Lionsgate returned after sitting 2024 out, sprinkling some magic dust in the form of Now You See Me: Now You Don't and confirming Nancy and Matt Grobar's scoop that Glenn Close and Billy Porter have joined the cast of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The studio was followed by Sony showing the first 28 minutes of 28 Years Later, Universal touting new Spielberg and Nolan projects, Warner Bros playing 30 minutes of July tentpole Superman, Paramount confirming Meet the Parents 4 and Disney teasing Toy Story 5 during a presentation that culminated in a James Cameron tribute to Jon Landau. Following the fun, Nancy and Anthony revealed the global box office is red hot, with Gower Street predicting a $12.4B summer. Over 300 miles away from Barcelona in the quiet city of Cuenca, I touched down for Conecta Fiction & Entertainment, the annual Spanish TV industry get-together. Nothing quite as splashy there, but reps from Max and Lupin maker Gaumont Television France gave their views on some live issues, as boiling hot temperatures gave way to biblical floods in the mountainous locale. Read the news from Cuenca here. The Essentials 🌶️ Hot One: The BBC has greenlit Twenty Twenty Six, a successor to comedy series W1A and Twenty Twelve, with Hugh Bonneville reprising his role and Chelsey Crisp, Paulo Costanzo and Stephen Kunken among a blended UK-U.S. cast. 🌶️ Another One: Martin Compston and Aimée-Ffion Edwards are leading the cast of The Revenge Club (w/t), which has Paramount+ UK and Ireland, Gaumont UK and Fremantle attached. ☘️ One for luck: Webtoon manwah Teenage Mercenary is being adapted as a TV anime series by Japan's Line Digital Frontier. ⛑️ Saved: Ireland's Playhouse Studios has acquired the assets of UK post house Lipsync, which went into administration last month. Most staff have been retained. 🔭 In focus: Filming Italy Sardegna, the annual Sardinian TV fest that kicked off yesterday. Diana also spoke to festivals specialist Tiziana Rocca in this interview. 👨🏻⚕️ Doctor, doctor: Russell T Davies has poured more fuel on the fire over the future of his BBC and Disney+ sci-fi series Doctor Who, saying, 'We don't know what's happening yet.' 5️⃣0️⃣ Fiddy: Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson has taken his 50 Cent Action Channel overseas for the first time. 🦁 Heart of a Lions: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine launched a Gen Z label, Sunnie, at Cannes Lions. 🤝 New roles: Lookout Point co-CEOs Laura Lankester and Will Johnston hopped over to A24's UK team. 🏆 Winners: Swedish drama Vanguard, Germany's One Day in September and CW series Good Cop/Bad Cop took home Golden Nymphs from the Monte-Carlo TV Festival. Jesse Whittock wrote this week's Insider. It was edited by Jake Kanter. 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