20 Recent Horror Movies That Made ONE Big Mistake
14. Releasing Too Soon - 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Though 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was generally received more favourably than predecessor 28 Years Later, it ended up flopping catastrophically at the box office, enough that a planned third film is reportedly now sat in limbo.
Many were quick to claim that The Bone Temple effectively paid for the sins of the previous film, whose tonally jarring ending proved immensely divisive with casual moviegoers and may well have dissuaded them from going to see the sequel.
But there's a strong argument to be made that Sony's real mistake was releasing The Bone Temple so soon - less than seven months after the release of 28 Years Later.
Beyond the historic tendency for swiftly released sequels to gross less than what came before, the brief time window between sequels gave audiences little time to sit with the ending of 28 Years Later and come around to it.
One can imagine that if The Bone Temple arrived a year or even 18 months later, people would've had a little longer to ruminate on that wild ending, warm up to it, and then get excited for another entry.
Instead, combined with a relatively lackluster marketing campaign, it was sloughed into cinemas with bafflingly little fanfare.