To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the cult classic film, Donnie Darko is getting a sequel from filmmaker Richard Kelly with the upcoming Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel. Written by Richard Kelly himself, the sequel novel releases in Late 2026!
Variety details in their exclusive report, “the approximately 800-page book will take place in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the original film, which famously ended with the death of Jake Gyllenhaal’s titular Donnie Darko, a Southern California teen who spends the better part of the movie in a dreamlike state while anticipating the end of the world.”
Even more exciting here is that Richard Kelly is planning to use the upcoming sequel novel as the springboard to bring Donnie Darko back to the screen with future film projects.
“According to Kelly, the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple Donnie Darko film sequels,” Variety details. “The filmmaker’s goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future.”
Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel takes place in the 14 months after Donnie Darko’s death, while a potential movie sequel to come in its wake would take that huge leap forward in time and bring the main cast of the 2001 movie back together on screen.
“My caveat with doing a real sequel was that I want to reunite the original cast, and I want to take it onto a gigantic scale and that takes time and it has a price tag and it’s hard to pull this off because it’s multiple movies,” Kelly tells the outlet. “It’s this big, gigantic, unwieldy thing that I have to sort of wrestle into submission. But in my mind, that’s what it should be. Just given the way this movie has connected with people for so long. So I’ve set out to just build the whole thing out and map the entire thing out, knowing that there’s a lot of challenges associated with doing that.”
Kelly continues, “I think what I realized as the story got bigger and bigger and bigger is that I needed to go back in time and away from the sequel, and tell the story of what happens in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, like immediately after his death, because there’s so much essential information in that section of the sequel. And in my mind, I was like, why don’t I actually put together a novel and just publish that part of the sequel as a novel, so that I can release it into the world, and that will set the ship on its voyage to wherever this goes. And so this, in my mind, is the final puzzle piece to launching this sequel and to see what becomes of it.”
Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko did get a movie sequel back in 2009 with S. Darko, though that much-maligned movie was famously made without the involvement of creator Richard Kelly.
Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel is being published by Range Literary Publishing.
