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Nearly thirty years ago, a 25-year-old M. Night Shyamalan was actually offered the chance to adapt Nicholas Sparks's soon-to-be-classic The Notebook — and turned it down, choosing instead to finish the film that would become The Sixth Sense. Had he said yes, Hollywood might have boxed him into romantic drama for the next three decades. Instead, Shyamalan built a career on dread and reveals, while Sparks became publishing's reigning chronicler of small-town heartbreak.
That's what makes Remain — the new film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor — such an odd experiment. On paper, they're the two names you'd least expect on the same poster. The project began almost as a dare: someone on Sparks's team floated the idea of pairing him with Shyamalan, and Sparks — a longtime admirer of The Sixth Sense — jumped at it.
Here's everything we know about the new movie, Remain, coming to theatres in 2027!
Watch the Remain trailer now.
The newly released trailer plays that tension for all it's worth. It opens soft: Tate and Wren laughing, playing board games, falling for each other in the glow of a seaside house. Then the temperature drops. "Why can't we be together, Tate?" Wren asks, before the footage turns and she appears ready to hurt herself, then vanishes in front of him.
Shyamalan and Sparks developed the story together — one man's ghost story colliding with another man's love story — then split it in two directions. Sparks wrote his own version as a novel, Remain was published in 2025, while Shyamalan wrote, directed, and produced the film adaptation himself.
What is the film Remain about?
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Remain Plot
The plot sits right at that fault line. A grieving New York architect named Tate heads to Cape Cod to design a summer home when he meets Wren, a young woman who upends his carefully ordered world. It sounds like a Sparks premise until it doesn't: outlets have described the film as a Sparks romance walking into a Shyamalan thriller, and the book is described as a central romance that unfolds between a living man and, in effect, a ghost, lovers who can't actually touch.
When does the movie Remain come out?
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Remain Release Date
While you can only read Remain, the movie version drops on February 5, 2027, just in time for Valentine's Day. Warner Bros. had originally slated the movie for Halloween 2026, a scheduling flip that says something about which genre the studio ultimately decided was selling the ticket.
Who's in the cast?
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Remain Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal stars alongside Phoebe Dynevor, Ashley Walters, Julie Hagerty and Jay O. Sanders. Shyamalan told NPR that turning down The Notebook decades earlier protected his identity as a filmmaker who doesn't "pretend to be somebody else," and that Remain let him and Sparks finally collaborate without either one abandoning what he's known for. Sparks, for his part, has praised his two leads for finding the register the material needed, telling The Hollywood Reporter that after three decades of adaptations he's worked through most of the era's leading men — and that landing Gyllenhaal still felt "magical."
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