I’m avoiding spoilers for The Bone Temple, but I do think the box office success of 28 Years shows there’s definitely a market for this franchise. Once again, part of the problem with both 28 years amd The Bone Temple (separate from any additional issues 28 Years may have, or the poor scheduling of TBT) comes down to Hollywood not recognising which franchises actually need huge budgets and which don’t in order to succeed and tell a strong story. 28 years got lucky it did ok, TBT appears not to have done.
If The Bone Temple had been made on a more modest budget, it probably would have turned a solid profit. I'm not saying it was a pricey Marvel-esque budget by any means, but I do think the story of 28 Years (haven't seen TBT yet) could have been told more modestly budget wise. Given the track record of previous entries, there was no reason to believe that having a big budget would make the box office bigger.
The big lesson for any third film is to focus on a smaller, more intimate story - more in line with the original 28 Days Later. A giant budget won’t automatically draw in mass audiences for this sort of narrative. Ithink there was a phase where Hollywood thought (again, thanks to Marvel) that the bigger you go, the bigger the box-office - so everything is pressurised to get BIGGER. HUGE budgets. HUGE spectacle. It was forgotten for a while there that you can make something impactful that looks great on a modest budget; not everything needs to be a Marvel‑sized blockbuster to make good money.
The Alien and Predator franchises have finally figured this out. After years of ballooning budgets and therefore proportionately disappointing box office results, they’ve returned to smaller‑scale productions with Romulus and the recent Predator films - and those tighter investments have delivered far better returns on similar box office to the ones with the more bloated budgets that were considered failures. The difference is the ROI is much healthier, and the ceiling is recognised. Heck Star Trek used to use this model for the movies pre-Abrams, and that all worked out well up until Nemesis.
Just give a really budget-friendly, tight story wrapping things up, the 28 XXX fans will be happy, and the studio will make a much better bang for their buck. How much money does a load of blood-soaked extras running around a field REALLY need to cost? Do something more in the vein of the original 28 Days Later to wrap up this chapter, have Cillian Murphy as a headliner, in a story that lets him act the shit out of it, and that I think will be enough to make back some serious coin without massive spend (except for Cillian's salary, most likely).
Like the story or not, but Alien Romulus proved that lower budget doesn't mean naff or cheap-looking - just spent well, shoot it stylishly, and keep it contained enough story-wise to make it look good with one or two investments in some awesome set-piece scenes. That means on (broadly) similiar global box office to Covenant, Romulus was a huge success whereas Covenant was a bomb.
28 Days/Weeks/years is far more Alien than it is Marvel.
