Danny Boyle's Sunshine could have been a trilogy if it hadn't bombed at the box office

Sunshine featured an ahead-of-its-time cast of actors that almost all went on to be major stars. Cillian Murphy led the film as the inventor of yet another bomb, along with Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, and a pre-Cap Chris Evans. The only issue? The movie did “no business at all” at the box office, in Boyle’s words. 

It was also unrelentingly bleak—so much so that it apparently pissed off then-Fox film chief Tom Rothman, who Boyle has had “a number of fights with” over the years. “I remember him watching Sunshine, and I remember him saying, ‘The only hope you offer. The only hope you offer, Danny, is that little green plant shoot in that burnt-out oxygen garden. There’s a little green shoot, and you think there’s hope!'” he recalled. (Spoiler warning for this next part.) “‘And Michelle Yeoh sees hope! Then you kill her! In that moment, you kill her! You can’t do this!’ Anyway, I remember a big blowout with him about that.”

In a cruel tease worthy of a Boyle movie itself, the director lauded the shelved scripts. While he “can’t remember [the plot of either] in enough detail,” there was “an extraordinary idea in one of them” that involved the concept of “looking outside and moving.” While that’s, uh, pretty vague, Garland is also a writer who can make pretty much anything scary. (Just look at Annihilation.) Luckily, we’re still getting a different legacyquel out of the two in 28 Years Later, which opens June 20 in theaters. “What’s interesting is Alex has a natural instinct as a storyteller to want to tell these expanding stories,” Boyle shared. “That is why 28 Years Later wound up as a trilogy.”