Range Literary Publishing Lines Up a 'Donnie Darko' Book Sequel as Hollywood's Talent Agency Builds a Publishing Empire
Richard Kelly, the filmmaker behind the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko, is writing a book sequel to the film — and it will be published by Range Literary Publishing (RLP), the boutique publishing firm launched by Range Media Partners. The announcement came on Tuesday, 25 August 2026, as part of a wider reveal about RLP's expanding slate Variety.
For fans of the film, this means the world of Donnie Darko is heading to bookshelves in prose form, with Kelly himself steering the continuation. Details of the plot and release date have not yet been disclosed.
RLP is led by chief Jeff Speich, a former CAA agent — CAA being one of the major talent agencies in Hollywood. Speich spent over a decade at CAA before founding The Channel Road, a holding company whose portfolio includes two healthcare companies and a wellness-focused publisher. He now brings that entrepreneurial background to RLP, which sits within Range Media Partners, a talent management and production company Variety.
The Donnie Darko sequel is one of several projects showing how RLP operates: it builds publishing projects around figures already working in film, music, and comics. In December 2025, RLP partnered to release a limited special edition of HYDE, a graphic novel by Jesse Negron, Johnny Depp, and Ridley Scott, which reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Variety.
RLP has also launched Range Comics (RC), a dedicated imprint for comics and graphic novels. Earlier in August 2026, RC published The Outlaw Cherie Lee — the first comic book by musician Shaboozey and the first issue of a three-part Western series that expands the story from his album The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales Variety.
Publishing is not the only new frontier for Range. In March 2026, Range Media Partners announced the launch of a game publishing division led by Ben Jones. That division sits alongside Range Music Publishing and Range Literary within the company's owned-and-operated publishing capabilities Variety.
What ties these moves together is a straightforward idea: a talent company that already manages writers, directors, musicians, and performers is now also the publisher of their books, comics, and games. The traditional path — a creator's agent selling a book to an outside publishing house — is being shortened, with Range keeping the project in-house from representation to publication.
Whether that model produces commercially competitive results across books, comics, music, and games remains an open question. But the slate is growing, and the Donnie Darko sequel gives it a title that already carries a built-in audience.
