Topping James Patterson’s collaboration with Mr. Beast, M. Night Shyamalan and Nicholas Sparks might be show business’ most unlikely duo. Nevertheless, just as Patterson x Beast rocked the book world, Sparks and Shyamalan are bringing their odd coupling to theaters. Remain, based on Sparks’ 2025 novel, sees Shyamalan working his dark magic on Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays architect Tate Gordon. After Gordon’s sister’s death, he visits Cape Cod to design a summer home for his depressed best friend. While there, he meets Wren (Phoebe Dynevor), a mysterious young woman who, well, there’s always a twist, right?
The union of Sparks and Shyamalan is decades in the making. Sparks actually approached a young Shyamalan about the screenplay to The Notebook, but the young filmmaker had a movie called The Sixth Sense to make. (“You’ve got to give him his pass,” Sparks told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “It all worked out for him!”) When they reunited, it was under “the condition that each of us would come to that meeting with an original story that would work for both of our genres.” The result was Remain, which Sparks said “wasn’t really an adaptation” nor a “novelization.”
“It was both of us taking that original story we first conceived at the very first meeting, and then he worked in his medium, and I worked in mine,” he continued. “I gave him a real long leash on his medium, and he gave me a real long leash on mine.”
Shyamalan’s film fulfills his part of the agreement. Remain opens February 5, 2027.