"Donnie Darko" was rejected by every major distributor, then released just six weeks after 9/11 with a jet engine crashing into a teenager's bedroom at the center of its story — it earned barely $500,000, vanished from cinemas and became a generational obsession only after teenagers discovered it on DVD

Some movies are ahead of their time. “Donnie Darko” managed something stranger: it arrived at precisely the worst moment in modern history for its own plot.

Richard Kelly’s debut — a moody, time-bending story about a troubled teenager, a six-foot rabbit named Frank, and a jet engine that falls out of an empty sky into a suburban bedroom — hit American theaters on October 26, 2001. Six weeks earlier, the country had watched aircraft fall out of the sky for real. Nobody was buying tickets to see it happen as entertainment, and the film’s own trailer, engine crashing through a roof, was essentially unmarketable. The timing wasn’t the film’s fault. It was just catastrophic.

Nobody wanted it — except Christopher Nolan

The heartbreak is that “Donnie Darko” was already a survivor before 9/11 finished it off. Kelly was a 25-year-old first-timer whose script was so strange that the project only got made because Drew Barrymore fell for it — her production company backed it, she took a supporting role as an English teacher, and her name helped attract a cast that somehow included Patrick Swayze, Jake Gyllenhaal (then a largely unknown 20-year-old), and, in his very first film role, a teenage Seth Rogen.

Then came Sundance in January 2001, where the film premiered to critical admiration and total commercial silence. Every major studio passed. Buyers called it inaccessible and unmarketable — a sci-fi teen drama that was also a family satire that was also about time travel and fate. After months without a deal, it was days from being dumped straight to video.

The save came from an unexpected corner: Christopher Nolan, whose own puzzle-box film “Memento” had just become a hit for tiny Newmarket Films, encouraged the company to take a chance on Kelly’s movie. They did. And then the world changed, and the brave little release never stood a chance: $110,000 in its opening weekend across 58 screens, down to 17 theaters within three weeks, gone soon after with roughly $517,000 in total — a rounding error even against its modest $4.5 million budget.

The DVD that became a password

What the theaters couldn’t do, living rooms did. The DVD arrived in March 2002 and something remarkable started happening in dorm rooms and basements across America. One kid would watch it — often via a red Netflix envelope, back when Netflix meant mail — sit stunned through the ending, and immediately make a friend watch it, mostly so they’d have someone to argue with about what it meant.

That was the secret of “Donnie Darko” as a phenomenon: it demanded a second viewing and a long conversation, which made it terrible for opening weekends and perfect for word of mouth. It became a generational password. Owning the DVD, quoting Frank, having a theory about the tangent universe — this was teenage social currency in 2002 and 2003. US home-video sales blew past $10 million, twenty times its box office. Midnight screenings sprang up and, at one New York theater, famously ran on and on — fittingly, for a film whose entire story unfolds over 28 days, and which was shot in 28 days.

Britain, which got the film a full year late, skipped the flop stage entirely and treated it as an event — a hit there, and eventually No. 2 on Empire’s list of the greatest independent films ever made. By 2004, the “failure” was so beloved that Kelly got to do what flop directors never do: release a director’s cut back into cinemas.

The world caught up

If you want one image for how completely the world came around, look at the music. The film’s devastating final montage was scored with a stripped-down piano cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” recorded cheaply by Kelly’s college friend Gary Jules because the original was too expensive to license everywhere they wanted.

In December 2003, that little cover — the theme song of a movie almost nobody saw in theaters — went to No. 1 in the UK as the coveted Christmas number one, beating the pop machine at its own game. The film that couldn’t sell tickets had produced the biggest song in Britain.

Donnie Darko the character spends the movie learning that being out of step with your timeline isn’t the same as being wrong. Somewhere, a generation of teenagers with worn-out DVDs understood exactly what he meant.