Blake Crouchhas had a great career not only writing novels but also adapting them to television.HisWayward Pinestrilogycame first, with Matt Dillon and Carla Gugino starring in the FOX television adaptation. Then there wasGood Behaviorseries with Michelle Dockery, based on the Letty Dobesh books. Now there’sDark Matter, which Crouch is arguably more in creative control of than the previous shows.Joel Edgerton stars as Jason, a physics professor who gets kidnapped and wakes up in an alternate reality; the series chronicles his quest to get home to his original reality, and his wife, played by Jennifer Connelly.
With this focus on alternate realities, many worlds, and superpositions, we were curious if there was one major decision that would’ve completely changed Crouch’s life and branched off into a reality in which he’s not writing at all. The author pinpointed one particular moment in his life that could’ve changed everything.
“I guessit was a decision when I was finishing my undergradat Carolina, Chapel Hill. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I was writing, of course, but you know, you can’t really make a living writing. Mostly,” laughed Crouch. “So I was looking at law school — ‘I guess I’ll go to law school.’ And I think that’s maybe what a lot of people think, ‘I’ll just go to law school.’ And so I applied to, like, one place, which was Carolina, and I got waitlisted. And so I ended up not going.” Crouch continued:
And I think about that a lot, because I feel like if I had gotten in, my life would have [changed]. That’s a strong branch. There’s a version of me that got in and I’m a southern lawyer in North Carolina. But if I do that, then my eye gets taken off of my focus on writing.
“Instead, I didn’t, and I took a paralegal job, which is far less intense.And so I got to keep my focus on writing,” added Crouch. “But I think if I had gotten into law school and gone down that path,I probably would have become a lawyerand would have lost some of that intense focus that brought me here today.And that to me is a scary alt version of myself, but maybe that Blake is super happy and, you know, on Instagram, doing yoga on a mountaintop.”
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And that to me is a scary alt version of myself, but maybe that Blake is super happy and, you know, on Instagram, doing yoga on a mountaintop.
Blake Crouch Almost Made Dark Matter Into a Movie
Dark Matter
The road thatDark Mattertook from page to screenwas a long one, a decade long, in fact. It began as a book, of course, not a TV show. “I think visually as I’m writing, but I try actively not to think about what an adaptation would look like while I’m writing the novel.I really want the novel to be the novel,” explained Crouch, adding:
“And once it’s locked off to copy edits and proofs, then I start wondering, ‘Should this be something and if so, what is it?’ In the case ofDark Matter,I had only written the first 140 pages back in 2014, and then those pages leaked out from my publisher to Hollywood, I think via foreign sub-agents. So suddenly, there’s a lot of interest around it,and I kind of had to make a decision, and it felt like, at that point, it’s a movie. And so we sold it as a movie and then found out after I finished the book [that] it would be just not very good.”
“Obviously, you can do anything in two hours — great movies have been made — but there was so much that we couldn’t do. And when we were developing it, that became super clear.We found ourselves cutting the plot much more than we would want to,” addedDark Matterproducer Matt Tolmach (Venom, Spider-Man: Homecoming). “There were more places to go and more characters to explore, even beyond what happened in the novel. So yeah,it just felt like we wanted more real estate.”
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“What was special about the idea was the characters and really connecting with them emotionally, which the book did. And we found that that’s really hard to do in a 110-page script for a film. But the moment it went to television, it was like, ‘Oh, you may actually write scenes and have these people talking about this thematic stuff,’ and then it opened up.”
Dark Matterpremiered today, August 16, 2025, with the first two episodes on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode weekly through June 17, 2025. you may watch it through the link below:
