If you were a high school or college student in the early 2000’s, then you know the film Donnie Darko. This was THE edgy, unique, and deep film that everyone was talking about. Your friends saw it and then told you to see it. Your artsy schoolmates wouldn’t shut up about it. Ever. The film holds a cult status for a reason. It’s confusing, atmospheric, has a banging soundtrack, and has deeply rooted lore. It’s also finally getting a sequel now in the form of a novel, The Philosophy of Time Travel.
Now, perhaps you remember that there actually was a film sequel to Donnie Darko already. You’re not wrong; there was. S. Darko was released in 2009, 8 years after the original hit theaters. The problem with that film (besides it being really awful) is that it had no involvement from Richard Kelly. Kelly wrote and directed Donnie Darko but didn’t own the rights to the film. That gave another production company and 20th Century Fox an opportunity to capitalize on the original film’s popularity. They pumped out a sequel about Donnie’s sister, Samantha, and that’s what we got.
Without Kelly’s involvement, there was really no chance for the sequel to match the structure and intensity of the original. Die-hard fans know that the world of Donnie Darko was fleshed out in written form. The film features a book, “The Philosophy of Time Travel.” It does a lot of heavy lifting for the plot in filling out potential plot holes and reinforcing the narrative. Incidentally, The Philosophy of Time Travel is going to be the name of the novel Kelly is releasing as the official sequel. It’s right in the subtitle of the novel. “The epic sequel to the motion picture Donnie Darko.”
Kelly has a lot of thoughts on the project. As he states, “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.”
For clarification, when Kelly keeps talking about the “sequel,” he’s referring to what his original plans were for one. He originally envisioned something taking place 28 years into the future. Now, the goal is to take this novel, make it into an animated film, then do the 28 years later live-action film. That’s a lot of Darko. Having The Philosophy of Time Travel as the centerpiece of it all is kind of fitting. The in-universe version of it did the heavy lifting for the film’s plot. The real-life one is lifting an entire universe of films.
The Philosophy of Time Travel is set to release later this year for the 25th anniversary of the film. Whether it gets a film adaptation is still up in the air, like a falling plane engine.
