"Dear David" creator says he didn't get paid for BuzzFeed movie about his story

If you frequented Twitter back in 2017, you may remember what was at the time a rather innovative, ongoing short-form horror story called “Dear David,” which was supposedly based on a real-life haunting experienced by writer and illustrator Adam Ellis. If you watched any B-level horror movies in 2023, you may remember that Dead David was adapted into a film that featured Justin Long among its cast. As it turns out, despite the film being based on his art and his story—and literally featuring a protagonist named Adam who worked at BuzzFeed—Ellis had little to nothing to do with the actual film. 

When a follower tagged him in a post about the trailer on Monday, Ellis wrote on Twitter/X that he “did not get paid” for Dear David, which was a co-production between BuzzFeed Studios and Lionsgate Films. “It’s legal. BuzzFeed owns everything you make there,” Ellis explained further. “They initially sold the project to New Line, and I was supposed to get money when the movie was made. I had a contract for the New Line project, but they eventually dropped it and I assumed it was dead. I had long quit my job at BuzzFeed. A couple years later I was informed they had regained rights and sold the movie to Lionsgate and it was going into production in a week. I was never consulted or paid for this new project, which again is legal because BuzzFeed owns everything you do. It sucks but it’s all technically above board.”

Ellis has long maintained that the events in his “Dear David” thread actually did happen, but he’s moved on to telling other scary stories, like this year’s illustrated anthology Bad Dreams In The Night. Earlier this year, he posted that he hadn’t seen the Dear David film, adding, “I left Buzzfeed half a decade before they filmed it, and had no say in what they did with it. I tried to sell it to Ryan Murphy but they wouldn’t let me, so I quit my job there.”