Cormac McCarthy's Movie Adaptation For Final Twin Novels Is No Longer Happening

Published Aug 18, 2026, 8:18 PM EDT

Adam has been writing in the entertainment news space for over a decade. Beginning his career of covering film and TV at CinemaBlend, he has also appeared on The Flash Podcast and done several radio spots. 

The film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s final two novels has been scrapped.

In 2022, one year before McCarthy passed away, the prolific author delivered the companion novels The Passenger and Stella Maris within six weeks of each other. These were McCarthy’s first books since The Road came out in 2006, and there had been plans to adapt this duology as a single movie. However, that’s no longer happening.

While speaking with Variety, filmmaker Jeff Nichols brought up that while Yankee Commandante, a movie based on the same-named article by David Mann about Che Guevara that he intended to make with Adam Driver, fell through, these two do have “another project” that they plan to work on together. When interviewer Marlow Stern asked if this project was the film adaptation of The Passenger and Stella Maris, he answered:

It’s not. Those two books would become one screenplay, which I’ve written, because the books are connected. But that was with New Regency and I don’t think they’ll be moving forward with that one. It’s a challenging story and it made for a challenging screenplay. Ultimately, they were looking for a more commercial story and I think I was a little too faithful to the books.

Nichols, who most recently delivered 2023's The Bikeriders, confirmed in May 2024 that he intended to adapt The Passenger and Stella Maris, which he described as “heady stuff.” Two years later, he had to shelve this creative endeavor due to creative differences with New Regency, which most recently partnered with 20th Century Studios on February’s Psycho Killers. Next up for the entertainment company is its currently-undated film adaptation of the video game series Watch Dogs.

The Passenger and Stella Maris follow siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, with Bobby serving as the first novel’s protagonist, and Stella following suit in the second novel. Their father helped develop the atomic bomb in World War II, but the siblings, who are both math prodigies, both struggle with his contributions to the Manhattan Project. Alicia dies by suicide in 1972, with The Passenger exploring Robert dealing with the grief of losing his sister 10 years later, and Stella Maris chronicling Alicia’s mental health struggles at the same-named mental institution.

Four of McCarthy’s books have previously been adapted into movies: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, and Child of God. The film version of No Country for Old Men was especially successful; its accolades included winning Best Picture, Best Director (the Coen Brothers), Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem), and Best Adapted Screenplay (the Coen Brothers) at the 80th Academy Awards, along with being nominated four other categories.

While his vision for The Passenger and Stella Maris will never be realized for the big screen, Nichols is keeping busy in other ways. In the same interview, he described the aforementioned mysterious project he wants to make with Driver as “an important film not only about our relationship with Cuba but also our relationship with the Southern Hemisphere and whether we’re able to export our ideology.” Nichols is also currently filming the Southern gothic supernatural horror movie King Snake, which began production in April.