Cult classics rise from the ashes of box office failures to become certain film canon staples in their own right, and, of those, Donnie Darko is a force of nature. It’s the kind of movie you watch with your high school friends late at night, or with your college friends who are astonished that you never saw it in high school. Its director Richard Kelly hasn’t lost any of that Donnie Darko fever yet, as he has some ideas to make a(nother), “more ambitious” sequel.

Kelly spoke with HMV about his prospective plans and said that he wants to make it bigger and really give the whole thing some thought.

I think there’s something much bigger and more ambitious to do in that universe. It’s big and expensive and I think there’s time to get to that. I want to make sure we’ve got the budget to do it justice and not to compromise anything. Another story in this world needs resources and we need to have that in place. I need to get my next film out of the gate and then we can go back and look at it.

Donnie Darko actually does have a kinda-sequel, S. Darko, which focuses on Donnie’s younger sister Samantha and is, to put it mildly, not great. Maybe Kelly wants to take the opportunity to rewrite that part of the universe and go in an entirely new direction with it all. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone are pretty big stars now, so there’s no telling whether they’d be down to come back for a sequel.

For the fans out there, Kelly also said that he has a bunch of projects in the works right now, and will be back at it as early as this year.

I’ve been working on a lot of different projects. The trouble is they’re all very ambitious and expensive so they take a lot of time to get in place. We’re being very careful to set things up properly, but I’m planning to make up for lost time and make several movies back to back. It’s nice to be able to bring people back to where we started, but I plan to be back behind a camera in 2017.

Would a Donnie Darko sequel be worth it? Since it’s still just an idea and no real details have been released about the cast or the plot or anything, it has the potential to add more to the universe Kelly created in 2001.

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