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It’s a very, very mad world: A book sequel to the 2001 cult classic film “Donnie Darko” will be releasing later this year from filmmaker Richard Kelly and Range Literary Publishing.
Titled, “The Philosophy of Time Travel,”
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.
Written by Kelly over the past 10 years, “The Philosophy of Time Travel” will debut in Q4 (in line with the 25th anniversary of “Donnie Darko” on Oct. 26) and is now available for preorder at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. An specific sale date will be announced in the coming months.
Produced by Flower Films, “Donnie Darko” debuted at Sundance in 2001 and was distributed theatrically by Newmarket Films later that year. Along with Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Seth Rogen.
According to Kelly, the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple “Donnie Darko” film sequels. The filmmaker’s goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue to the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future.
“I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years,” Kelly tells Variety. “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.”
Kelly adds: “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.”
Kelly (who previously release “The Donnie Darko” book, a behind-the-scenes look at the original film) says that while the writing of the “Donnie Darko” book sequel has taken place over the last 10 years, he’s actually spent more than two decades trying to figure out how to make a sequel film work through. There have been “all sorts of permutations and there have been multiple parent companies and studios that have been involved in the whole process” amid rights issues, according to 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,” Kelly says. “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.”
He continued: 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.”
While Kelly is keeping the full plot details of the “Donnie Darko” book sequel, “The Philosophy of Time Travel,” under wraps, Variety has an exclusive look at the cover (seen below) and a teaser video (above), along with Kelly’s own description for the project:
“I think there’s a lot of surprises when you realize who the characters really are in the reality of Southern California, how they were drawn into this collective dream. They 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. There’s a lot of surprises about who they are, and I think 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. So I just I wanted to write a really gratifying part for all the actors. And that goes down the line even to some of the actors who only appear in one or two scenes. You’ll see that they have really fleshed out narrative arcs and everything.”
The novel is written in found-documents style with alternating pieces from Donnie’s mother, Rose (McDonnell), and father, Eddie (Osborne) “and them vigorously documenting what is happening to them and why their son has died and their paranoia and their separate detective missions about how to figure out what happened and why it happened.”
Kelly says he has not yet approached the “Donnie Darko” cast about reprising their roles for sequel films and wants the release of “The Philosophy of Time Travel” to serve as his pitch.
“I never want to put pressure on anyone or make anyone feel like they have to give me an answer,” Kelly says. “That’s ultimately going to be a decision that the whole cast, with each individual deciding what they want to do, and they’re going to have this big gigantic book to read to see what happens to their character, all the new definition added to their character. I have every actor’s voice in my head. They’re so crystal clear and I know what they sounded like 25 years ago, I know what they sound like now.”
Kelly adds: “I love my cast. 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.”
“The Philosophy of Time Travel” will mark the first novel release from Range Literary Publishing, the boutique, author-forward imprint from Range Media Partners, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary. Range Literary Publishing’s focus is to support both emerging and established voices while identifying projects with strong potential for adaptation in film and TV from clients like Kelly.
“We are thrilled to partner with Richard to bring the highly anticipated sequel book ‘Donnie Darko’ into the world,” Range Literary Publishing chief Jeff Speich says. “Richard is an extraordinary storyteller who created a universe far ahead of its time, and the film has rightfully achieved iconic cult status. Audiences have been eagerly awaiting a follow-up story to his original work for over twenty-five years. It is a true privilege for this title to be the first book released by Range Literary Publishing.”
In addition to “The Philosophy of Time Travel,” Range Literary Publishing (RLP) will soon publish “Kenan and Kel Meet Zombies,” the first in a series of “Kenan and Kel Meet …” graphic novels. Earlier this month, RLP’s comics division, Range Comics, published Shaboozey’s “The Outlaw Cherie Lee,” his first comic book and the first issue of a three-part Western series, which expands the story from his album “The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales.”
RLP’s 2027 slate includes “Burnout,” a debut novel from Range founding partner and former CAA agent Michael Cooper (which is in early development as a film adaptation at Range Studios); illustrated children’s book “The Grove of Lost Things” from Gabe Basso; children’s book “Big Love, Little Love” by M. Night Shyamalan’s wife, Bhavna Shyamalan; lifestyle/coffee book “How We Host” by Akilah Releford Gould; and thriller novel “Temples of Iron” by Mark DeFriest.
As an early-days project in December 2025, RLP partnered to release a limited special edition of graphic novel “HYDE” by Jesse Negron, Johnny Depp and Ridley Scott, a reimagining inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
