Danny Boyle Reveals SUNSHINE Was Originally Meant to Be a Trilogy
It turns out the Danny Boyle-directed Sunshine wasn’t just a one-way mission to reignite the dying sun, it was almost the start of a much bigger journey.
In a recent interview with Collider, Boyle dropped a bit of info for fans of his 2007 cult classic. While the film has found love over the years, bolstered by a stacked cast (Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Benedict Wong), it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire when it first hit theaters, and that, unfortunately, may have cost us a full-blown trilogy.
Boyle said, referring to screenwriter and frequent collaborator Alex Garland:
“Originally, when we were doing it, Alex wrote two other parts. It was supposed to be a trilogy. It wasn’t two other scripts; he had an outline for where the story would go.”
It wasn’t just more sun-scorched tension or another twist on psychological sci-fi horror. Boyle teased:
“It was a planetary trilogy. It was to do with the sun itself, with two other stories.”
While he didn’t go into too much detail, likely out of deference to Garland, he hinted at some pretty ambitious territory:
“What’s interesting is Alex has a natural instinct as a storyteller to want to tell these expanding stories, and that is why 28 Years Later wound up as a trilogy.
“An extraordinary idea on kind of Elon Musk scale, even though he’s lost a lot of credibility. But it was interplanetary stuff, it had more to do with that … there’s no rich man in it. But the idea of looking outside and moving.”
He didn’t spill anymore info, just in case Garland ever wants to revisit or repurpose those ideas. But, it’s hard not to imagine what could’ve been… a trilogy about humanity’s push into deep space, built around science, sacrifice, and sun-soaked dread.
Given that 28 Years Later is finally becoming a trilogy decades after 28 Days Later, maybe Sunshine isn’t completely out of orbit just yet. Boyle has a knack for returning to stories that deserve a second (or third) shot. And if Garland’s blueprints are still lying around somewhere, who knows? May it could happen.