It’s a big year for book-to-screen adaptations, but I’ve never heard a story about how a bestseller was turned into a movie like the one for Whalefall. The thrilling novel from Daniel Kraus became a New York Times bestseller back in 2023, and is already a movie on the 2026 release calendar thanks to the very modern way the author pulled in the Whalefall filmmaker into the movie’s premise.
CinemaBlend heard this story while we were at the trailer launch event for Whalefall in Los Angeles, CA on Monday night. Here’s what writer/director Brian Duffield said about how he stumbled on making the movie:
This came to me because I followed Daniel Kraus, who won a Pulitzer Prize last week, but for the wrong book. Should have been for this one. But no, I followed Daniel on Twitter, when it was still called Twitter, I think. And he tweeted out the logline of Whalefall, which was a 19-year-old is swallowed by a sperm whale and has an hour of oxygen left to escape. And I slid into his DMs, real slutty, and I was like, ‘I need to read this book as soon as possible and probably make this movie.’ And I just felt the lightning bolt hit when I read the tweet, and then he said, ‘I'm not finished writing the book.’ And I said, ‘That's on you.’
Isn’t it wild how a single post on social media can inspire a filmmaker into making a whole movie? The Whalefall trailer just dropped online by 20th Century Studios and can be seen in the video above. As Duffield continued:
And then about three or four months later, he sent me the book and I didn't know anything else about the book except for that tweet. I didn't know it was about fathers and sons. And I have a very distinct memory of reading it on my iPad, holding my son in my arms, and it really messed me up in terms of a father/son son story and I think within a couple of hours of him sending it to me, I told him I would do whatever it takes to be a part of it, and here we are.
Whalefall is about a young man named Jay (played by Austin Abrams) who used to scuba dive a lot with his father Mitt (Josh Brolin), but they didn’t have the best relationship. When Mitt dies in the ocean, Jay goes on a scuba dive in search for his dad’s remains, but instead he gets swallowed by a whale. Duffield also added this when talking about adapting the material:
I was really lucky that I was smart enough to ask Daniel to write the screenplay with me, and so that became our burden together where the book is so much inside of Jay's head. And, then it was how to translate that into a movie that doesn't have voiceover and is almost purely physical and really reactionary, and how to not just convey all of the whale information that the story conveys to an audience that probably knows next to nothing about the inner workings of the sperm whale....how to really convey [Jay's inner turmoil] in terms of a visual storytelling, especially when our visuals are really confined to a very, very small space for most of the movie. My cheat code was just working with Daniel.
Whalefall is a thriller that tackles Jay’s grief associated with losing his father, but on a visual and technical level Duffield needed to make the experience of being swallowed by a whale feel immersive and realistic. He could luckily lean on the research that Whalefall’s author already did for the book. As a book worm myself, I know I'm very excited by the idea of the author being so close to the movie, along with the unique concept itself.
When talking about Whalefall, Brian Duffield also likened it to two of the best space movies The Martian and Gravity, since both movies also involve a person dealing with intense emotions while getting stuck somewhere. It’ll be interesting to see how Whalefall compares to these films with the main character spending most of the movie stuck inside the belly of a whale rather than in space.
Oh, and you know a little movie called Weapons? It was one of our favorite movies of 2025 and starred both Abrams and Brolin. We can’t wait to see this reunion between the actors in a completely different film. Whalefall is coming to theaters on October 16.
