With the 25th anniversary of Donnie Darko fast approaching, writer-director Richard Kelly is teasing a major update to the film’s story, starting with a sequel book later this year.The cult classic sci-fi film first made waves in 2001 and arguably launched star Jake Gyllenhaal’s career. It follows the titular Donnie after he narrowly survives a freak accident, only to be visited by a man in a bunny suit who prophesies the end of the world, and ends with Donnie going back in time to sacrifice his life so the movie’s events never happen. Now, we’ll finally get to find out what happened in the aftermath, thanks to Kelly’s upcoming book, The Philosophy of Time Travel.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Kelly, who hasn’t directed a movie since 2009’s The Box, told Variety that he’s spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how to make a Donnie Darko sequel work. The first step is covering key events after Donnie’s death in The Philosophy of Time Travel, but Kelly hopes this will lead to an animated adaptation of that story and multiple live-action sequels, as he also plans to shift the narrative 28 years into the future. At that point, he’s hoping the original cast will reunite for a follow-up feature film.“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 said. “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.”Although Kelly said he loves the original cast, he admitted it’s “up to the marketplace to decide” whether he can move forward with his plans and that new characters would appear in the proposed sequel movies regardless. He added, rather ominously, that “we have all this wonderful technology that didn’t exist five years ago.”The director has also detailed his ideas for the ongoing Donnie Darko story, which will explore how the characters process the shared 28-day “Tangent Universe” experience and Donnie’s death. They eventually come together to form a kind of support group that gradually becomes cult-like. People who seemed villainous in the first film may even turn out to be ordinary or sympathetic in reality, struggling to understand why they committed terrible acts within the dream universe. A straight-to-DVD sequel to Donnie Darko previously emerged in 2009. S. Darko, starring the late Daveigh Chase as Donnie’s sister Samantha, was widely panned, and Kelly had no involvement in the project due to relinquishing the rights to the franchise when he was 24 years old. Along with Chase, actor Patrick Swayze has also passed away since the original movie was released.After the cult success of Donnie Darko, Gyllenhaal and his sister Maggie went on to star in a long list of Hollywood movies, as did Jena Malone and Seth Rogen, who had a small part in the film. The Pitt star Noah Wyle also appeared as a doctor who gives Donnie a copy of an important book of lore called The Philosophy of Time Travel, after which this new book is presumably named.The post 25 Years Later, Donnie Darko Is Getting An Unexpected Update appeared first on Den of Geek.