Given its cult status today, it might be hard to believe Donnie Darko initially struggled to find an audience. Released on October 26, 2001, writer-director Richard Kelly’s debut feature arrived in theaters with a $4.5 million budget and opened to just $110.4 thousand, a commercial disappointment that distributors initially couldn’t figure out how to sell. What followed that quiet theatrical run was one of independent cinema’s most remarkable second acts, with explosive DVD sales and packed midnight screenings fueled by a word-of-mouth reputation that spread across a generation of film fans. By the mid-2000s, Donnie Darko had carved out a place in the cultural conversation that no Hollywood studio could have predicted as a film that rewarded repeat viewings and refused to hold the audience’s hand through its labyrinth of time travel and suburban dread.
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Donnie Darko‘s cult status, predictably, pushed producers to pursue a sequel — Kelly had surrendered his rights to the franchise at age 24 as a condition of getting the original made. That sequel, 2009’s S. Darko, was written by Nate Atkins, directed by Chris Fisher, and produced entirely without Kelly’s involvement. The film follows Donnie’s younger sister Samantha Darko (Daveigh Chase) seven years after her brother’s death, stranded with her friend Corey (Briana Evigan) in a small Utah town after their car breaks down. Suddenly, a nearby meteorite crash sets off a series of time-bending events that thrust Samantha into a mind-bending journey similar to the one her brother experienced years before. On paper, the setup borrows enough from Kelly’s original framework, but the finished product showed no one involved understood what made Donnie Darko so special. In fact, the sequel was so disastrous that Kelly himself publicly disowned it.
Why S. Darko Is Such a Bad Donnie Darko Sequel
The biggest problem with S. Darko is that it mistakes the aesthetic of Donnie Darko for its actual substance. The sequel lifts the surface iconography wholesale, as dark roaming clouds punctuate scene transitions, Roberta Sparrow’s fictional text on time travel resurfaces as a plot device, and Samantha’s sleepwalking directly mirrors her brother’s. The sequel even recycles footage from the 2001 original, which only serves to highlight the difference between the two movies. On top of that, where Donnie Darko built its complexity through well-paced ambiguity, S. Darko incorporates two separate tangent universes, stages resurrections and identity swaps, and then sidesteps the very plot points those sequences create, crafting a narrative that is simultaneously over-complicated and empty. Samantha even disappears from the film for a significant stretch as the story pivots to Corey (Briana Evigan), a decision that severs any emotional investment the audience has managed to build.
Against a $4 million budget, S. Darko grossed just over $1 million at the box office in international markets, despite the success of the first movie — in the United States, S. Darko was a direct-to-video release. The movie sequel currently sits at 13% of critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes, with audience approval only reaching 18%. For comparison’s sake, Donnie Darko has 88% approval by critics and 80% approval by fans.
More importantly, Kelly has been quite vocal about how he feels about the sequel in multiple interviews. Speaking to Pop Matters, he stated: “I hate it when people ask me about that sequel because I had nothing to do with it. And I hate it when people try and blame me or hold me responsible for it because I had no [involvement]. I don’t control the underlying rights to [the Donnie Darko franchise]. I had to relinquish them when I was 24 years old.” Kelly’s frustration is entirely justified, as the sequel attempts to make money by exploiting a self-contained story that never required an expansion, with no concern for the original creator’s intentions.
S. Darko is currently available to purchase or rent on major digital platforms like Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, while the original Donnie Darko is available to stream on Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, and the free streaming service Fubo TV.
Do you think a proper Donnie Darko sequel involving Richard Kelly could ever work, or is it better to leave the original movie alone? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
