’28 Days Later,’ Unavailable on Streaming, Finally Lands on Digital Ahead of ’28 Years Later’

Thorny rights issues made Danny Boyle's 2002 zombie film tough to find legally, but Sony acquired the rights ahead of the sequel.

More like 22 years later, amirite? “28 Days Later,” Danny Boyle‘s seminal zombie horror movie from 2002, is finally being made available for digital rental and purchase after spending years in streaming limbo.

Sony on Monday, December 16 released the trailer for “28 Years Later,” the upcoming sequel in the franchise that reunites Boyle with screenwriter Alex Garland. The movie looks awesome — even if the corpse of Cillian Murphy has seen better days (check out the 1:48 mark in the trailer to see what we’re talking about).

But the real surprise was that “28 Days Later” is being rescued from that purgatory where it was stuck for so long. The film will be made available on digital rental and purchase via PVOD on Dec. 18 and is available for pre-order immediately.

Despite its acclaim, “28 Days Later” was largely unavailable on digital streaming services — unless you wanted to watch it illegally. 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures released it back in 2002, and there was a sequel, “28 Weeks Later,” that released in 2007, but since then, there have been some rights issues with the film that prevented it from being found easily online. In fact, DVDs for it had largely been out of print, so even those physical media folks might’ve been out of luck.

But producer Andrew MacDonald back in February revealed he had bought the rights back, and he promptly sold the sequel rights to “28 Years Later” to Sony Pictures, which included the PVOD rights to “28 Days Later.” Sony doesn’t have its own streaming service, so it’s unlikely it will be made available for SVOD streaming in the near future, but it’s possible the film gets licensed somewhere in the future.

“28 Years Later” is being released theatrically by Sony Pictures on June 20, 2025. The film stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, and Ralph Fiennes, and it is executive produced by Murphy after he starred in the original.

Deadline reported Monday that the trailer for “28 Days Later” had the second-biggest launch for a trailer for a horror movie ever, and it now has 14.6 million views on YouTube at time of writing. Watch it below: