Nia DaCosta didn’t sugarcoat anything when she sat down with Empire magazine to talk about the underwhelming box office performance of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. According to the director, every standard industry barometer pointed toward a hit – yet the audiences simply didn’t show up. “We made a great film, and I’m really proud of it, and people liked it,” DaCosta said, and you can sense how much the disconnect between the critical reception and the actual ticket sales bothers her.
The Numbers That Never Found Their Audience
Released in January 2026, the sequel pulled in roughly $58.5 million worldwide, against a production budget of $63 million – and once you factor in marketing costs, the loss runs even deeper. For comparison, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) grossed $151 million globally. In other words, the follow-up made it to about a third of its predecessor’s haul, and that’s where it stopped.
What makes this especially painful is that the critical response has been the strongest in the franchise’s history. The Bone Temple currently sits at 92–93% on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest score the series has ever pulled in. The audience score is also above 88%, and the opening-weekend CinemaScore came in at a solid A- – the kind of feedback that usually translates into long-term success. Just not this time.
So What Went Wrong?
The causes most likely stacked up on top of each other. DaCosta herself floated the idea to Empire that the sequel may have arrived too soon: many viewers conflated it with the first film and assumed they’d already seen it last summer. Only seven months separated the two premieres – an unusually short window in the traditional blockbuster model, hardly enough time for hype to build around a follow-up.
On top of that, January is essentially a “dump month” in Hollywood. Post-holiday spending fatigue, cold weather, and strong competing titles like Avatar: Fire and Ash, Zootopia 2, and The Housemaid all worked against the film.
The third factor is the divisive tone. The closing scene of the first film – the unexpected introduction of Jack O’Connell’s “Jimmy Crystal” character and the Fingers gang – simply threw off a chunk of the traditional horror crowd. And The Bone Temple‘s marketing leaned visually too close to the first film; judging by Reddit threads, plenty of fans couldn’t even tell that a second movie actually existed.
Not the First Time the System Has Shortchanged DaCosta
The director has been on a strange unlucky streak in recent years. Candyman (2021) hit theaters in the middle of the Covid pandemic, The Marvels (2023) became the lowest-grossing theatrical release in MCU history, and Hedda (2025) was quietly buried by Amazon. And now The Bone Temple – a movie critics and audiences both praise – is one nobody actually b
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.
HorrorThrillerScience Fiction109 min