"Donnie Darko" to get sequel 25 years after original

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By all accounts, Donnie Darko shouldn’t exist.

The film, which turns 25 years old this year, ran into numerous obstacles both before and during its storied production. For one, the script centers on a troubled teen ultimately driven toward gun violence — a topic most Hollywood executives at the time stayed well away from, especially in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Then there’s the story of how writer-director Richard Kelly shot the infamous opening sequence — “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS — without first securing the rights to the song, a leap of faith that could have well ruined one of the film’s most iconic moments.

Last but not least, Kelly was not a seasoned filmmaker at the time, but a 25-year-old University of Southern California grad making his first feature. “I had a lot of anxiety,” Kelly tells Big Think. “If you look at behind-the-scenes camcorder footage, you can see the weight dripping off my body. I was this skeletal kid, trying to keep it together. But I knew what I wanted, visually, and that got me through.”

If you’re a fan of Donnie Darko, you might already know all this. You’ll also know that, despite the many challenges, the film not only made it to theaters but eventually became a cult classic — steeped in 1980s nostalgia, it became a defining film for millennials and continues to resonate with audiences today.

What you may not know is that Kelly, now in his 50s, is gearing up to release a long-awaited sequel. Titled The Philosophy of Time Travel , it’s coming out this December. But unlike the original, it’s not a film, but a novel — one Kelly thinks has enough material for multiple cinematic adaptations.

“Whether we’ll actually get a Donnie Darko 2 , we’ll have to see,” he says. “But we certainly can go there if the audience wants to.”

Mental novels

One of the many things that makes the original Donnie Darko such a memorable film is its fleshed-out world, which seems to tell a much larger story than the one unfolding in the film itself.

This is no accident. “When I’m working on a screenplay,” Kelly explains, “I’m basically adapting a novel that already exists in my mind, but which I haven’t bothered to write down.”

Although he previously produced a series of graphic novels based on his 2007 film Southland Tales , a dystopian black comedy starring Dwayne Johnson in one of his first big acting roles, The Philosophy of Time Travel will be Kelly’s first true novel.

For once in his career, he says, “I didn’t just hopscotch over this part of my writing process, and gone through the laborious and agonizing process of putting together a novel and getting it published.”

Agonizing, because although he’s clearly got a talent for it, Kelly has always considered himself a “director first and a writer second,” someone who thinks not in words but images like the unsettling bunny costume worn by Frank, the strange entity that warns Donnie of the “end of the world.”

Kelly, who began drawing and painting at a young age after his parents enrolled him in an art class, met with numerous artists, only to nail down the costume’s design himself. Inspired by the rabbits of Watership Down , the final look is less Easter Bunny and more predatory, with a toothy grin and large, white eyes reflecting moonlight.

Inside The Philosophy of Time Travel

The Philosophy of Time Travel covers a time frame of about 14 months and picks up less than 48 hours after the end of the original film, where an airplane engine falls on top of Donnie’s bedroom, killing him.

“But it also described what happened during the days before his death,” Kelly says. “People are convening to figure out what the hell happened. Was Donnie murdered, or did he take his own life? And what does his death mean?”

Kelly describes the novel as a “gigantic procedural murder mystery,” the action moving from Donnie’s traumatized Los Angeles community to the Mojave Desert and the Oval Office.

He also says he wrote The Philosophy of Time Travel in large part to respond to persistent questions from fans of Donnie Darko. “Why didn’t Donnie get out of bed at the end of the movie? Why was he laughing hysterically? What about that weird drawing he makes in physics class?”

In the original film, these questions go largely unanswered. At the time, they provided cause for speculation and analysis while also imbuing the film with a kind of mystery-for-mystery’s-sake, not unlike David Lynch’s Twin Peaks . This time, these loose ends provide the building blocks for a new story, one that promises more answers than questions.

Kelly describes the original film as a “jigsaw puzzle that is only 70% complete. You’ve got all these remaining pieces floating around because you haven’t quite figured out where they are supposed to go.”

A film misunderstood

In a way, Kelly began working on The Philosophy of Time Travel back in 2001, when he took all of the extra material that didn’t make it into Donnie Darko and incorporated it into the film’s official website.

This included passages from the fictional book of the same name referenced in the film, written by Roberta Sparrow and given to Donnie by one of his high school teachers. Kelly wrote some while working on the script, others in the middle of filming, making it up as he went along. These constitute the skeleton that The Philosophy of Time Travel is built around.

Kelly’s decision to continue Donnie Darko’s story is also a response to how the original film was understood, or maybe misunderstood.

“Some people just want the film to be its own, standalone thing,” Kelly says. “A lot of people want it to just be about schizophrenia and the like, but that’s not what Donnie Darko is to me. To me, it’s a big science fiction world that delves into a lot of big ideas.”

While many people think that Donnie is mentally ill, and that Frank is an apparition, Kelly himself has always understood the film as being about alternate dimensions or “tangent universes” reaching out to ours via people like Donnie — aspects of the story that were previously kept in the background but will now take center stage.

No regrets

Although he prefers directing films over writing novels, Kelly believes the struggle was worth it. “It’s been a huge challenge, but I didn’t want to live out the rest of my life without giving a crack at continuing to tell what I always felt was an unfinished story, the beginning of something greater.”

Asked whether The Philosophy of Time Travel could ever make it to the big screen, Kelly says that the novel contains enough material for three feature films.

He is particularly excited about taking the Donnie Darko franchise into animation: the medium he’d choose if he were to have made the original film today.

“Technology is now in a place with animation where we can do things that we couldn’t do decades ago,” he says, listing motion capture as one example. “A sequel could start in the animated realm and then, when there is a 28-year time-jump, become live action so all the actors can play their characters as they are.”

One feature of today’s entertainment industry Kelly isn’t too keen on is the rise of direct-to-streaming distribution models. “Everything is going to end up on a streaming service, maybe even our consciousness at some point. But the original was such a theatrical experience, and I’d love for people to have that again.”

Reflecting on his experience writing and rewriting Donnie Darko over the course of all these years, Kelly says he “would like to make a film where, at the moment we send it off, I feel there is nothing left I would change. Not a single frame. Complete satisfaction. I hope that’s possible. I’m not giving up on it.”

This article 25 years later, “Donnie Darko” is finally getting a sequel is featured on Big Think .