20th Century Fox28 Years Later marks a surprising first for Danny Boyle and Alex Garland. Not only are the director and writer reuniting after a decade apart, but they’re doing so with a sequel. Apart from T2, Boyle’s 2017 sequel to Trainspotting, neither he nor Garland has attempted to build franchises out of their ideas. But 28 Years Later will be the first film in a trilogy, turning the duo’s revolutionary zombie world into a cinematic universe.As novel as that sounds, this isn’t the first time Boyle or Garland has considered making a trilogy. According to Boyle, there were plans to give Sunshine, their 2007 space-horror about a group of astronauts trying to reignite a dying sun, similar treatment. “Originally, when we were doing it, Alex wrote two other parts,” Boyle recently told Collider. Garland hadn’t progressed beyond the outlining stage, but both parties were interested in continuing the story... if Sunshine had been a bigger hit.Before the 28 Years Later trilogy, Boyle and Garland would have turned Sunshine into a sci-fi franchise. | 20th Century FoxSunshine was a flop, but time has been kind to the film, if only because its cast is chock-full of future award-winners and franchise heavyweights. Boyle and Garland handpicked an ironclad ensemble in Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Benedict Wong, who’ve all gone on to scoop up Oscars and Emmys and lead blockbusters of their own. In Sunshine, the star is slowly getting colder, so our heroes plan to drop an atomic bomb into its core to “restart” it and save humanity (the science makes no sense, but hey, it’s a movie). The film’s first half focuses on the dread of traversing space, but a last-minute twist introduces a sun-obsessed slasher who begins picking off the cast, after which Sunshine loses major steam. No one survives, making it a bleak addition to Boyle and Garland’s filmography and one that presumably would’ve made it difficult to create more films. Still, Boyle insists Garland had a plan.“It was a planetary trilogy,” Boyle said of Garland’s sequels. “It was to do with the sun itself, with two other stories.” Though he chose to keep plot details vague in the off-chance that Garland would revisit the ideas down the line, Boyle revealed that the films would have featured “an extraordinary idea” on “kind of Elon Musk scale, even though he’s lost a lot of credibility. But it was interplanetary stuff.”Garland had a promising idea for Sunshine, but the film’s box office numbers kept him from exploring it. | 20th Century FoxUnfortunately, Sunshine didn’t do well enough at the box office to earn a sequel, much less two. Whether you chalk it up to its grim ending or its left-field horror twist, audiences just weren’t gelling with the film. “The movie did no business at all,” Boyle said. Had it earned Fox a bit more money, he and Garland “might well have” reunited much sooner. Still, it’s worth looking back on Sunshine, if only to see how far its cast and crew have come since.28 Years Later opens in theaters on June 20.