Alex Garland

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation. As Murphy drags his not-yet-world-famous cheekbones through an eerily abandoned metropolis, we see Piccadilly plastered with the names and faces of the missing and the dead. Audiences in 2002 were reminded of the recent World Trade Centre attacks, which happened in the middle of filming.

If you make the mistake of following journalists on Twitter, you would think that Civil War is the most talked about film of the year. It's not — and the over-coverage it's been receiving isn’t because it's particularly amazing or outrageous or riské or inflammatory. It did reach number one at the weekend box office, but on a quiet weekend, competing with third-week tickets for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. No, all the attention has come because Civil War is about journalism and there are few things we like talking about more than ourselves, despite few others being that interested. And so, here I am. But more interesting than the film is the release strategy behind it, because it represents A24 taking a punt on far more expensive films than usual.