Grandma Death's Book
Donnie Darko opened 25 years ago on 58 screens. Everyone has made money off it since, and its director still can't get a film sequel made. So he wrote the book from the movie.
Donnie Darko opened in America 25 years ago tomorrow, on October 26, 2001. The film starts with a jet engine falling through the roof of a suburban house, and it came out six weeks after September 11. The advertising had a crashing plane in it, so there was barely any advertising. It peaked at 58 theaters, took $110,494 its first weekend and $517,375 by the time it left cinemas in April 2002. The budget was $4.5 million, raised by Drew Barrymore's Flower Films.
Then it went to DVD and stopped being a flop. The Pioneer Theatre in New York ran it at midnight for 28 months straight, home video passed $10 million, and in December 2003 the "Mad World" cover from the soundtrack, which Gary Jules and Michael Andrews had recorded in about an hour and a half, was the UK Christmas number one. It beat The Darkness. This month Fathom brought the film back for three days in a new 4K restoration, billed as its widest theatrical release yet (Consequence). The bar was 58.
Everyone got a sequel out of it except the man who made it. In 2009 a production company he had nothing to do with put out S. Darko, straight to DVD, 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. Richard Kelly's statement at the time: "I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved." His own sequel keeps hitting what he calls rights issues: "there have been multiple parent companies and studios that have been involved in the whole process," he told The Playlist.
So he wrote the book instead. In the film, Donnie's science teacher hands him The Philosophy of Time Travel by Roberta Sparrow, the old woman the kids call Grandma Death, and the plot runs on its pages. For 25 years it only existed in scraps: text in the director's cut, a few pages in a 2003 companion book. On December 15 Kelly publishes a real novel with that title, the first from Range Media Partners' new books imprint, cut down from an 800-page manuscript. He calls it "the final puzzle piece to launching this sequel." According to the publisher's synopsis, the book inside the novel "appears to predict the exact circumstances of its own recovery."