‘Donnie Darko’ Getting Sequel Novel from Filmmaker Richard Kelly; More Films in Works

Well, this isn’t how I was expecting to get a sequel to the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko. But, as they say, it’s a mad, mad world.

Yes, Variety reports that the original film’s director, Richard Kelly, will release a novel later this year that continues the events of Donnie Darko. It marks the first novel release from Range Literary Publishing.

The book is titled The Philosophy of Time Travel and “will take place in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the original film”. As you may recall, things don’t end well for star Jake Gyllenhaal in his role as a teenager stalked by a man in a rabbit suit, who eventually discovers a wormhole.

Kelly wrote the novel over the last ten years.

Said Kelly, “I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years. I’m fairly certain they’re aware that I’ve been working on all this stuff, everything, and the sequel is so big that 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.”

Added Kelly, “This section of the sequel 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.”

Well, okay then.

Kelly did reiterate that he has yet to approach the Donnie Darko cast about doing another film. Instead, he wants The Philosophy of Time Travel to serve as his pitch.

Continued Kelly, “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.”