It looks like we can all throw out our copies of S.Darko (what? Just me?) as Donnie Darko, finally has a proper sequel and if creator/writer Richard Kelly gets his way, it may open the door (portal?) to more Donnie Darko on the big screen.
But before that, let’s discuss the book first.
Kelly has penned a sequel to the iconic time travel head-scratcher called The Philosophy of Time Travel and it’s an 800-page tome that takes place in 1988 in the immediate aftermath of the events of the movie.
While there’s no official release date yet, the book will be out before the end of the year, just in time to celebrate the movie’s 25th (25 years!?!) anniversary.
Tidbit:
Official synopsis from the Amazon link: The official sequel to the cult classic film Donnie Darko – the question fans have asked for over twenty years, finally answered.
On October 4, 1988, a derelict jet engine falls from the sky over Los Cerritos, California, and crashes through the bedroom of sixteen-year-old Donnie Darko, killing him instantly. For his family, the tragedy should end there. It doesn’t.
Assembled entirely from recovered government transcripts, secretly recorded conversations, and early email correspondence, The Philosophy of Time Travel reconstructs the eighteen months that follow through the eyes of Donnie’s mother, Rose Darko, as she and her husband Eddie, a senior CIA analyst, are drawn into a widening investigation that reaches from the Oval Office to the Mojave Desert. FBI surveillance teams, FAA officials, USC professors, and a mysterious circle of trackers and financiers all converge on the same impossible discovery: a strange “celestial fluid,” a set of unexplained artifacts, and a forbidden book, Roberta Sparrow’s own Philosophy of Time Travel, that appears to predict the exact circumstances of its own recovery.
Set against a real backdrop of the late Reagan era, the novel expands the mythology of the original film; Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, the Manipulated, into a sustained conspiracy that questions whether Donnie’s death was ever an accident at all, and whether “gone” is the same as “gone for good.”
Written by Richard Kelly, creator of the film Donnie Darko, this is the authorized continuation of the story for longtime fans and new readers alike.
And once the book hits stands and hopefully proves that there’s an audience out there for Donnie’s world, Kelly says he’s got big plans for a return to the universe with the original cast of the movie as well as an animated adventure adapting the book.
“I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years,” Kelly says, “This book starts off in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, and then there is much more narrative material that I’ve been developing where the time jumps 28 years into the future, and there’s a lot of really exciting stuff that happens starting around 2015/2016 and onward after that, so that’s where I started with the sequel.”
So, the plan is: “This section of the sequel [the book] would be animation and then, in theory, should it happen, there would be a gigantic time jump of 28 years or so, and where the actors, should they want to play their roles live and in the flesh, that would be wonderful, too. So we’ll see what happens.”
Presumably Kelly sees the novel as being animated due to the passage of time in the real world, meaning that the actors, as happens, are all much older.
He says that the novel has been developed over the last decade and he’s been trying to figure out the rest of Donnie’s world for about twenty years, but he’s finally got it straight in his head and it sounds like he’s raring to go: “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,” he says.
However, he says that he realised that as he was developing the sequel, he soon realised that thirty years in the future isn’t where the story (after the movie) begins: “I realised 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.”
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The novel is written as a collection in in-universe documents, arranged by Donnie’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) mum, Rose (Mary McDonnell) as his family try to work out why Donnie died and what exactly happened to him.
He goes on: “They [the characters in the movie] were drawn into this thing called the tangent universe, this lunar month, this dream that lasted for 28 days that they collectively all experienced together, and they’re sort of all trying to piece it together. And they form this sort of support group that turns into a cult, in a way, and they all come together.
“For me, it was really gratifying to see all the characters start to interact with each other in response to Donnie’s death, and they all become really close friends. And there are characters who are villainous in the movie who you realize in real life they’re not villainous at all; they might have done horrible things in the dream of the first movie, but when you meet them in the reality of the sequel, they’re trying to process why they did horrible things in this dream, and they’re coming to terms with it and they’re analyzing it just like the fans are analyzing the movie.”
But, while he’s excited for the book, it’s clear that Kelly really wants to tell more of this story on screen, reinforcing for me, the notion that the book is a taster to see if there’s still love for Donnie and his weird world because if not, I don’t think these movies will ever happen.
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“I love my cast,” Kelly goes on, “I would love to reunite with all these wonderful actors, and now it’s just sort of up for the marketplace to decide, and that marketplace includes a global fan base and our wonderful cast of actors, a whole bunch of new characters who are new to the story, who can be played by new actors, and we have all this wonderful technology that didn’t exist five years ago.”
I love the first movie and still, twenty-five years later, I watch video essays and read around it, trying to get a clearer idea in my head of what exactly the movie was about, but to me, this just makes it a richer experience and one that warrants revisiting and reevaluating. If Kelly can capture that again, then I am fully on board
The Philosophy of Time Travel will mark the first novel release from Range Literary Publishing and is expected before the end of 2026.
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Source: Variety
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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