Danny Boyle's Hope in the Apocalypse
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, Fawzia Mirza’s Shakespearean Romance, and an empress.
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15 years ago, I saw 28 Days Later (2002). Last night I watched 28 Years Later.
28 Years Later is a stunning follow-up from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland to their iconic virus/zombie apocalypse film 28 Days Later (2002).
Now that we’ve all lived through a mass-scale pandemic, the first film in this series takes on a deeper meaning, and Boyle’s 2025 re-imagining hits harder.
Danny Boyle shared his ethos behind the film:
“These [infected] are not monsters. It is something that exists within us all and that we're all capable of, and it's a condition that we can all end up with really.”
What I found so wonderful about the first film is that much of it focuses on holding onto our shared humanity as our species extinguishes itself through violence.
28 Days Later crystallizes this, but now the apocalypse feels strangely familiar.
Not the infected, but the thin social fabric, the manufactured rituals of control we use to simulate order when none exists. The film echoes the fragile bargain of the last few years: civilization running on a brittle consensus that can fracture overnight.
It stars fantastic performances from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes (a standout!), and Jodie Comer, but centers on a boy’s mission to save his sick mother. To do this, he is forced to grow up too fast. And the acts of violence he is asked to partake in reflect how the society at large has started to celebrate violence.
The most barbarous sequence in the movie is not the barrage of gory attacks from the half-dead, but a moment where the community of the living glorifies an act of killing.
The tenets are clear. We may live in a world that is consumed by violence and beset by disease, but every life is sacred. As is every death.
For More:
28 Years Later (2025) trailer.
Back to the beginning… 28 Days Later (2002) trailer.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Disney tops 2025 box office revenue for the first half of the year.
Constantin Film (Resident Evil) launches new Ravenhood romance franchise.
Carla Gugino will star in a horror film based on the Knifepoint Horror podcast.
Emily Robinson's horror directorial debut is Ugly Cry.
Jack Martin joins surreal BriTANicK pizza odyssey.
Jennifer Love Hewitt EPs true crime docuseries A Killer Among Friends.
Fawzia Mirza (dir: Queen of My Dreams) teams with Amazon MGM on Hana Khan Carries On.
Hungarian spy thriller Espionage for Beginners lands global sales with Moonstone.
UK–Costa Rica epic Black Gold adds Oscar-winning EP Deepak Sikka.
Disney+ adapts the Korean webtoon The Remarried Empress into a live-action series.
BBC revives 2026 FIFA satire Twenty Twenty Six.
Roy Lee (Barbarian) produces Arab-language horror The Vile.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
The rankings for the domestic box office gross in the first half of 2025:
$1.1bn - Disney Studios
↑222% vs. 2024
$907M - Warner Bros.
↑29% vs. 2024
$411.4M - Universal
Decrease vs. 2024
$283.1M - Paramount
Increase vs. 2024
$193.9M - Sony
↓55% vs. 2024
$125.4M - A24
↑2% vs. 2024
$123.8M - Lionsgate
↓19% vs. 2024
$108.5M Amazon MGM
↓9% vs. 2024
$88.9M - Angel Studios
Increase vs. 2024
Disney tops the list, but just two of their films carry excessive production costs ($350M for Snow White and $380M for Captain America: Brave New World), which would mean those two films alone need roughly $1.8bn to recoup but stalled out at a combined $621M worldwide box office total.
On this chart, it’s also wild to see A24 beat out Lionsgate. We’re also hopeful that despite the big drop from Sony, 28 Years Later will pull in anywhere from $28M - $35M+ in its opening weekend.
Resident Evil producer Constantin Film’s newest franchise is Kate Stewart’s steamy Ravenhood series, a four-book retelling of the Robin Hood story.
The romance-suspense saga will follow a young woman who moves to North Carolina, where she falls in with a mysterious clan who live by their own rules and brandish matching tattoos. Stewart, for the first time, will pen her own screenplay alongside Mario Celaya, who is also producing with the German indie outfit.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Carla Gugino will star opposite Lou Taylor Pucci in Winthrop, a horror film inspired by cult podcast Knifepoint Horror from Spectrevison (Elijah Wood’s genre studio behind Mandy, which has expanded into other media). Directed by Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism), the film will explore the story behind Knifepoint's most popular episode, The Lockbox (listen here), where a woman tries to save her cousin from something supernatural.
Heavy influences of Hieronymus Bosch on this one. We look forward to seeing how Gugino (who kicks ass in Spy Kids) fights stuff that looks like it’s out of The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Eighth Grade actress Emily Robinson has just finished production on her directorial debut, Ugly Cry, a body horror which she also wrote and stars in. The film is described as a visceral exploration of beauty standards in the modern era, filtered through the lens of a young actress who has been told she has an “ugly cry”. Robinson is joined by Ryan Simpkins (Fear Street: 1978), Aaron Dominguez (Only Murders in the Building), and Robin Tunney (By Design).
Jack Martin (La Brea) has joined The Untitled BriTANicK Pizza Movie, a surreal comedy starring Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) and Sean Giambrone (The Goldbergs). The film follows two college loners whose pizza delivery trip becomes a psychedelic odyssey. Martin will play the sociopathic RA who acts as the film's villain. Written by former YouTube sketch stars turned SNL Duo BriTANicK, Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher are currently in pre-production.
Veteran scream queen Jennifer Love Hewitt (I Know What You Did Last Summer) is set to EP and narrate A Killer Among Friends (trailer), a docuseries from Investigation Discovery. The six-part series takes a look at six historical murder cases debuting on Jul. 14th.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / FESTIVALS
Fawzia Mirza’s work centers on forbidden romances. Her next project is a Chicagoan twist on Romeo and Juliet, Hana Khan Carries On.
Synopsis:
A chef running her family's Chicago restaurant finds romance through a dating app, unaware her match belongs to a rival restaurant dynasty threatening her livelihood.
Amazon MGM is the studio with Mindy Kaling’s Kaling International serving as the production company. So the pedigree is strong, but doubled by the fact that Mirza’s last feature, Queen of My Dreams (premiere: TIFF & SXSW), is a fantastical and imaginative telling of a forbidden romance (trailer, in theaters today).
She also directed one of the best episodes of Hulu’s Deli Boys, “Sweaty Boys”, featuring a particularly tense scene in which one of the deli boys (Raj) leads his girlfriend into the hands of a killer.
Tidbits:
Moonstone Entertainment (Crash) has boarded global sales rights to Espionage for Beginners, a Hungarian-Belgian-Spanish spy film. Led by Benett Vilamányi (The Brutalist) and Renan Pacheco (Emily in Paris), it is inspired by a true story set in the 70s during the Cold War, following a Hungarian hotel receptionist whose life takes an unexpected turn. Espionage for Beginners is produced by Film Squad, the company behind the upcoming Russell Crowe, Rami Malek history drama Nuremberg.
Oscar-winning EP Deepak Sikka (The King’s Speech) joins Black Gold, a historical epic marking the first UK–Costa Rica fiction co-production. Set in 1850s Costa Rica, it follows President Juan Rafael Mora’s resistance against U.S. invader William Walker, and how coffee helped them win a war.
If you saw The Last of Us season 2, you were probably in awe of the decaying, overgrown foliage-cosumed locations in Seattle. DNEG, the show’s VFX company, crushed it, as you can see in their VFX Breakdown.
UK Post House Lip Sync (VFX, Sound/Mixing: The Brutalist) has been saved from bankruptcy by Playhouse Studios (Irish VFX company), which has bought their assets.
Beyond the Gaze, a new doc that played at Doc NYC, deconstructs the challenges that Jule Campbell faced in creating and running the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition for 30 years. Directed by her daughter-in-law, Jill Campbell. Trailer.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Disney+ is adapting the ultra-popular Korean webtoon The Remarried Empress into a live-action series starring Shin Mina, Ju Jihoon, Lee Jongsuk, and Lee Seyoung. With over 2.6bn views, the story blends romance, revenge, and power struggle, following Empress Navier’s political and emotional rise after a terrible betrayal.
The BBC has officially greenlit Twenty Twenty Six, a new sitcom with Hugh Bonneville set to reprise his role as iconic W1A (scene) and Twenty Twelve (trailer) character Ian Fletcher.
A man of many jobs, the character was a former head of Olympic Deliverance satirizing the 2012 London games, then took on the job of BBC head, and this time is involved in the 2026 FIFA World Cup as Director of Integrity.
British filmmaker John Morton has also returned to write and direct the six-part series.
Arab-language horror The Vile is a co-production with horror producer master Roy Lee (Barbarian, The Ring) and Abu Dhabi-based Image Nation.
Synopsis:
Amani's peaceful life as a wife and mother shatters when her husband brings home a second wife, unleashing mysterious dark forces into their household.
The storyline feels pretty standard, but the change of characters/location makes it feel scary (teaser). AGC International (Sales rep: Hit Man, Late Night with the Devil) has taken international sales rights.
CJ ENM, Korean Entertainment powerhouse, inks major partnership with Shahid, the Middle East and North Africa’s largest Arabic-language streaming platform. The deal sees 20 premium Korean series from CJ ENM’s catalog offered on Shahid beginning this week.
ON THIS DAY
1975. Jaws is released.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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