Donnie Darko Took $517,375 in Cinemas. The DVD Took Twenty Times More.

Donnie Darko closed its American theatrical run on 11 April 2002 having earned $517,375. It cost $4.5 million to make. It opened on 58 screens and took $110,494 in its first weekend, which is the kind of number that ends careers.

Then it went to video and made more than $10 million.

That gap is the whole story. Not the time travel, not the tangent universe, not the book by Roberta Sparrow. The film failed completely in the only place films were then allowed to succeed, and its audience found it anyway, one rented disc at a time.

The engine falls out of an empty sky

Donnie Darko opens with a jet engine dropping from nowhere into a suburban bedroom. No plane. No explanation. An engine, a hole in a roof, and a boy who was not in his bed.

It reached American cinemas on 26 October 2001, six weeks after September 11. The trailer had aircraft in it. Richard Kelly later said the film was not attractive to people in that emotional, very deeply traumatizing chapter of history, which is a generous way of putting it. The marketing department had a film about falling aircraft and a country that could not look at one.

Newmarket released it into 58 theatres and hoped.

Nobody wanted it before that either

Kelly wrote it in his mid twenties, not long out of film school. It premiered at Sundance on 19 January 2001 and the major studios passed on it there, months before the towers, before anyone had a reason beyond not understanding it.

It got made because Drew Barrymore's company Flower Films put money in alongside Pandora Cinema, and Barrymore took a supporting part as the English teacher. Four and a half million dollars, backing a first-time director's script about a teenager and a rabbit. Nobody has properly thanked her for it since.

Seth Rogen is in it. It is his first film.

The audience arrived two years late

The DVD came out in March 2002. The Pioneer Theater in New York started running the film at midnight and did not stop for twenty-eight consecutive months.

Then in December 2003, two years after it had died in cinemas, Gary Jules and Michael Andrews' cover of "Mad World", recorded for the film, went to number one on the UK singles chart and stayed there for three weeks. It was the Christmas number one. A song from a flop almost nobody had seen beat everything else released that year.

By then the film had earned back several times its theatrical take, entirely from people passing a disc around.

Why it ends up on a shirt

Kelly wanted Frank disturbing and animalistic. He drew the first sketches himself and handed them to production designer Alex Hammond, who built the mask that came out of them. Long ears, hollow eye sockets, a grin with too many angles in it.

It works because it is a costume. Somebody in the film is wearing that. It is not a monster, it is a person who has put something on, which is considerably worse.

The Donnie Darko tee is the mask alone on black, hollow-eyed, no title and nothing to tell you where it came from. If you know, you know. If you do not, a rabbit is looking at you.

The film has never been fully explained, including by people who have watched it ten times and including, at points, by Kelly himself. That is not a flaw anyone needs corrected. The rabbit turns up, tells you how long you have, and declines to elaborate.

Related: the rest of the Screen shelf, including Eraserhead and Videodrome, or the full catalogue.

Another film that failed on arrival and outlived everyone who tried to bury it. Nosferatu 1922: The Film Ordered Burned.

More of the same shelf in 12 Shirts for People Who Peaked in the Video Store and 15 Tees for the Dark Souls.