Fight Club Author Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor Finally Heads to the Big Screen With Daniel Brown

Chuck Palahniuk fans, dust off your '90s angst: Survivor is back on the runway again. After two previous swings that never made it to camera, a new film adaptation is in the works — and this one actually has a writer-director attached, a target shoot window, and producers with money behind it. I know, we have been here before. But there is real movement.

So who is making it now?

Deadline says writer-director Daniel Brown is taking a crack at Survivor. Brown made his feature debut with the action thriller Your Lucky Day, which starred the late Angus Cloud and hit theaters in November 2023. He is writing and directing Survivor.

How we got here

• 1999: The same year 20th Century Fox released Fight Club, Palahniuk’s new novel Survivor hit shelves. Fox quickly grabbed the movie rights, hired Jake Paltrow (yes, Gwyneth’s brother) to write a script, and even started casting.
• Then 9/11 happened, and that early version stalled. Palahniuk later told Digital Spy that David Fincher was pushing the studio hard in development, but the climate changed and the film fizzled.
• 2008: I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence picked up the rights, wrote a screenplay, and publicly said Survivor would be his next project after Legend. It wasn’t. The movie never went into production, and the rights slipped away.
• Now: Third attempt. Brown is onboard to write and direct.

"They had gotten Jake Paltrow to write a screenplay and people were very happy with that. They’d started to cast it but then 9/11 happened and that seemed to harpoon all kinds of transgressive comedies."

- Chuck Palahniuk, to Digital Spy

What is Survivor about?

It opens in the most Palahniuk way possible: Tender Branson, the last living member of a group called the Creedish Death Cult, is alone on Flight 2039, somewhere over the Pacific. The plane is on autopilot at 39,000 feet and running out of time, and Tender is calmly dictating his life story into the cockpit recorder before the jet noses down and ends up in the Australian outback.

From there he rewinds his life: a compliant Creedish kid turned domestic servant who gets transformed into a chemically and cosmetically boosted media messiah. He becomes the face of a self-help empire, writes a hit memoir called Saved from Salvation, and an even bigger seller, The Book of Very Common Prayer — which includes gems like a Prayer to Delay Orgasm, a Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, and a Prayer to Silence Car Alarms. Along the way, he delivers the kind of bleak one-liners Palahniuk is known for — including this worldview you can practically hear being underlined: the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

Tender also has to explain why he definitely did not create the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Landfill, a sprawling 20,000-acre dump for America’s outdated porn. The book swings between absurd, sharp, and uncomfortably funny — a satire about fame as a meat grinder and how deeply weird modern life actually is.

Production plan

Ryan Rettig and Miles David Romney are producing for Community Garden and financier V42, with Mel Turner and Axel Paton producing for Ground Control. The current plan is to shoot in Auckland, New Zealand in early 2026.

Why this is noteworthy

Outside of Fight Club, the only Palahniuk novel to make it to the screen so far is Choke, which Clark Gregg directed back in 2008. Survivor has been circling Hollywood for decades, with multiple scripts and near-misses. If Brown can steer this one into production, it will be a small miracle — and a big win for fans who have been waiting since the Clinton era.

Third time’s the charm? I’m cautiously optimistic.