Back in November, we heard that Lionsgate and BuzzFeed were teaming up to bring us Dear David, a ghost story BuzzFeed writer Adam Ellis wrote on Twitter (and swears is completely true). Now The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Dear David has already wrapped production, with Anna and the Apocalypse‘s John McPhail having directed the film from a screenplay by Mike Van Waes. The cast of Dear David is headed up by Augustus Prew (Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series), Justin Long (Tusk), and Andrea Bang (A Million Little Things).
The film centers on
Adam Ellis, a former BuzzFeed employee and social media content creator who becomes haunted by the ghost of a boy possessed by a demonic entity. In 2018, Ellis’s Twitter thread about his experiences with the ghost he called ‘Dear David’ went viral, gaining him more than a million followers on the platform.
You can read Ellis’s original tweets at THIS LINK. Van Waes worked with executive producer Evan Turner to develop the story Ellis told into something that work as a feature film.
Prew is playing Ellis in the movie, with Long playing the head of BuzzFeed. Details on Bang’s character were not revealed, all we know is that she is playing “another supporting lead role.”
Dear David is being produced by Richard Alan Reid of BuzzFeed Studios, Jason Moring, Michael Philip, and Naysun Alae-Carew. Dan Lin serves as executive producer alongside Evan Turner and Jonathan Eirich of Rideback.
It took a while to bring this story from Twitter to the screen, Dear David was first set up at New Line Cinema in 2018, so I’m glad to hear it has finally made it through production. Lionsgate hasn’t announced a release date yet, but we know they’re planning to get Dear David out into the world sometime in the fall of 2022.