So we do call this the "28" franchise now?

I saw 28 Years Later last night. I'm not going to give you much in terms of my thoughts on it. Let's just say that I was really with it for the first half, and then some curious decisions in the second half caused me to retract some of my enthusiasm.

I do want to talk about how we should be referring to these movies.

When a movie has just one sequel, that could be a one-off and we don't have to come up with a convention for talking about those two movies. But as soon as you add a second sequel, well, it's arguable that it has become a media franchise at that point. And every media franchise needs a name.

But what name for 28 Days Later and its sequels, the bookends of which were directed by Danny Boyle, with him serving as executive producer on the middle one?

I'd say it's instructive to look at A Quiet Place as a similar property, albeit in a more compacted timeframe. We didn't necessarily think we'd be talking about it as a franchise, but as soon as the third came out, it became the "Quiet Place" franchise. Easy enough.

It's not so easy for these movies. 

There are two words common to each title in the series, but neither of them rolls off the tongue if you want to mention the franchise casually and have everyone know what you're talking about.

You can say "Oh I really like the Quiet Place movies," but can you say "Oh I really like the 28 movies?" 

"Which 28 movies?" your fellow conversant might ask. "Is there a franchise with 28 movies? I don't think even Bond has 28 movies."

But if you said "Oh I really like the Later movies," your fellow conversant might be like "What?"

"Later," in and of itself, means nothing. Instead of making you think of zombies -- er, sorry, people infected with the rage virus -- it makes you think of an abbreviation of a phrase some Alfred E. Neuman smartass might give you: "Smell you later!" (And yes, I realize there is a good chance many people reading this don't know who Alfred E. Neuman is. Okay, how about Nelson Muntz, who I think actually says "Smell you later.")

I suppose a better point of comparison than A Quiet Place might be Before Sunrise and its sequels, which also have a preposition in the title. (Technically speaking, the internet tells me that "later" is an adverb while "before" could be either an adverb or a preposition.) 

In the case of Richard Linklater's movies, calling them "the Before trilogy" or referring to them as "the Before movies" works, because a) you're likely already speaking to someone who would be familiar with these movies, and b) it's the first word in the title, so your mind keys into it straight away. "Later" doesn't work that way because it's the last word in the title, so your mind has more trouble parsing that.

The brevity of a single word might not work here, nor does it need to, as proof with the Quiet Place example. So maybe the solution is "28 Later."

It excises a middle word, which is a disadvantage over "Quiet Place" as a franchise name, but I do think it communicates what you're talking about right away:

"Oh I really like the 28 Later movies," you say.

"Oh yeah, they're sick," says your conversant. 

(You're talking with someone in their thirties, as I regularly do when I talk about movies with locals in Australia.)

The reason this discussion matters is that 28 Years Later does not have any sense of being the last movie in this series. So not only will we need a name to talk about it in the past tense, but we may be talking about it in the present tense in perpetuity.

Without going into specifics, I'll just say that some of the weird decisions in the second half seem geared toward leaving this open for more movies -- probably to follow in short order. Which gives you an idea what the financiers think about the likelihood that this is now a proper media franchise with identifiable markers, meaning it's here to stay.

The only trouble is that they would now have to deviate from the escalating chronological structure of the titles, unless they are talking about doing 28 Decades Later -- which is not what the end of this movie would suggest. 

Though I did find myself imagining, there in the theater, some really outside-the-box, almost arthouse interpretation of where to take the franchise, where eventually get 28 Centuries Later and 28 Millennia Later, at which point the rage-infected have evolved back into fully thinking humans capable of inventing things and creating new technology, such that eventually they are indistinguishable from human beings as we are now. Mind = blown, right?

Even if that's where they want to go, they've forced a sped up timeline if they want to do it. I bet they're now regretting skipping straight from 28 Weeks Later to 28 Years Later, blowing past 28 Months Later when they had a chance to do it in, I don't know, 2012.