After more than two decades, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland finally reunited for 28 Years Later, the long-awaited third sequel in the 28 Days Later franchise last year. From the outset, the expressed plan was for a trilogy: three movies, beginning with 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple, that would tell the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), the young protagonist who we’ve watched come of age against the backdrop of rage-virus-infected England. And in the next installment, Cillian Murphy would reprise his role as original series lead Jim, apparently still stuck in the quarantined UK, almost thirty years after he woke up in that hospital in a deserted London.

It was all setting up a horror blockbuster at a scale we’ve seldom seen in the streaming age. After all, how many genre movies boast the name of a recent Oscar winner on the poster? Such was teased in the prologue of The Bone Temple, when we finally see Murphy on screen again: Jim now lives in an isolated cottage with his teenage daughter somewhere, presumably, in the north of England, doubling up as her history teacher. Their lesson is disrupted when they witness Spike and his fellow Bone Temple survivor Kellie (Erin Kellyman), formerly of the Jimmy gang, being chased down by a horde of infected. Jim prepares his hunting rifle. Roll credits. Jim’s back, baby!

That was—and still is, perhaps—the hope, at least. The problem? While 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple were financed together and shot back-to-back to cut costs, making the third part was always predicated on the box-office success of its predecessors. At CinemaCon last March, some months before 28 Years hit theaters, Boyle emphasized the importance of audience turnout in getting Part 3 green-lit: “[Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman] hasn’t given us finance for the third, and that’s where [exhibition] comes in,” he said. “So please, do us proud in your cinemas on June 20 and support the coming apocalypse.”

But while both 28 Years and The Bone Temple were acclaimed by critics—I’m yet to have a more transcendent experience at the multiplex than the latter’s Iron Maiden-scored finale, Ralph Fiennes losing his mind in Satanic makeup, the sequence made all the more electric by Nia DaCosta’s deft direction — audiences were seemingly put off. To be fair, they’re weirder movies than anyone could’ve possibly expected; less action-packed zombie romps, more thematically dense, existential mood pieces that peer into the darkest depths of the human condition. They are both bizarre, and, in their own ways, experimental. Jack O’Connell plays a blinged-out quasi-religious psychopath who leads a colorful cult of acrobatic Jimmy Savile impersonators. Fiennes befriends a giant zombie (Chi Lewis-Parry) with an even bigger… prosthetic. One of the infected gives birth. There’s a drugged-up Duran Duran dance sequence. All incredible, to be clear. But also probably jarring to anyone expecting classic midnight zombie flicks.

28 Years did pretty well at the box office, taking in $151.3 million on its $60 million budget. Sony was presumably so satisfied by this result, and excited by internal buzz around The Bone Temple, that the third movie was reportedly green-lit—with Murphy indeed in talks to return—in December last year, before DaCosta’s entry had even come out. But then The Bone Temple, broadly considered to be the superior of the two installments, inexplicably flopped at the box office, dropping to a $58.5 million take on its own $63 million budget.