28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Deleted Scene Reveals A Moment We All Wanted In The Film (And Now I Feel Robbed)

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple helped kick off the 2026 year in horror movies, earning critical acclaim but ultimately ending its run as a box office miss ($57 million worldwide on a $63 million budget). Just over a month after its theatrical release, The Bone Temple is being released on digital and PVOD platforms, and the film’s production extras are now being revealed.

Deleted scenes are always a popular point of intrigue with fans, and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has revealed one that is somewhat shocking. It’s just a brief scene, but also a pivotal one, which instantly fixes one of the bigger questions (if not criticisms) of the movie. So why leave it on the cutting room floor?

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Deleted Scene: When Jimmy Met Samson

There are two concurrent storylines in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The first sees young Spike (Alfie Williams) get caught up in the murderous cult of madman Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who roams the countryside terrorizing and murdering innocents. The other storyline sees Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) making a world-changing breakthrough with the infected Alpha known as Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Inevitably, these two storylines collide in a wild climactic finish. However, many viewers felt that there was one conspicuous issue with the progression of the film: there was almost no interaction between Jimmy and Samson.

Well, this deleted scene from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple delivers a moment that so many fans would’ve loved to see in the final film: Jimmy being faced with Samson, and having all of his Jim Jones-style mania suddenly ripped away. In fact, seeing Jimmy scamper away from a roaring Samson is more telling than it looks: it’s a callback to young Jimmy running for his life away from the home where his mother, family, and friends got slaughtered in the first wave of infection – reminding us that the adult Jimmy is really still just a scared boy hiding behind the bad boy facade of being Satan’s son. It was also the kind of lighthearted, funny moment that The Bone Temple arguably could’ve used more of.

Why Was This Scene Removed From 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple?

The final cut of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple takes the scene where Jimmy meets Kelson in a very different direction. The theatrical cut removes any prior interaction between Jimmy and Samson until the final moments of the climax. (SPOILERS!) Jimmy tries to coerce Kelson into posing as the devil to secure his position as cult leader; upon recognizing Spike, Kelson tries to free the boy by ordering Jimmy’s followers to crucify him. Jimmy flips out and stabs Kelson; Spike flips out and stabs Jimmy, while Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) leaves Sir Lord Jimmy impaled on a crucifix. Samson finds Jimmy on the cross and Kelson dying, but rather than acting like a brutish savage, the Alpha (who has been “cured” by Kelson) leaves Jimmy to his fate.

For better or worse, director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels) chose to tell two stories that only loosely intersect. Jimmy and Samson’s respective stories are meant as two contrasting ruminations on what it is to be “a monster” versus “human,” and the deleted scene, however funny, sucks some of the deeper resonance out of that theme. Logistically, the scene also makes the third act twist hard to pull off: the Jimmys are clearly observing Sir Lord Jimmy’s meeting with Kelson in this version, and see him fleeing from Samson. The ruse to have Kelson pose as Satan seems far less plausible after that. Keeping Sir Lord Jimmy’s meeting with Kelson isolated to the two of them makes the Jimmys’ gullibility much more understandable, later on.

The deleted scene also helps to explain why the film sidelines Samson for much of the third act, fighting with other infected offscreen, after the “cure” takes effect. It seems like some revision had to be done to get these two stories to converge in a sensible way.

Truthfully, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple ends with more dangling threads than there should be with the middle chapter of a trilogy – not to mention very unclear goals for the third installment, which will bring back original 28 Days Later actor Cillian Murphy as Jim.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is available on digital and DVOD platforms.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Is Missing Two Major Characters in Its Best Scene