Warner Bros. Pictures is in negotiations for the feature film rights to Allen Levi’s breakout novel Theo of Golden, with Tom Hanks in talks to play the title character. Gil Netter, Gary Goetzman, and Hanks will produce, with Levi serving as executive producer.
The highest-selling print book in America for 2026 so far. The number one New York Times bestseller for fifteen consecutive weeks. And now, Tom Hanks. Theo of Golden is having a year.
Who Is Allen Levi?
Levi was born in Bay Minette, Alabama, graduated from the University of Georgia, and spent thirteen years practicing law in Columbus, Georgia.
Then he pivoted entirely and started traveling to the United Kingdom to study Scottish fiction at the University of Edinburgh before spending over two decades traveling and working as a singer-songwriter. He has published two previous books: Oliviatown in 2003 and The Last Sweet Mile in 2014.
Theo of Golden began as a personal challenge. Levi spent three and a half years drafting the manuscript entirely by hand, surrounded by the pine trees of his rural Georgia property, with no deadlines and no editorial oversight. When he finished, he fully intended to put it in a drawer. His college friends refused to let him.
At their insistence, he enlisted his niece Aron Richey to help him navigate the world of digital self-publishing. By the end of 2023, they had sold around 3,000 copies. In 2024, sales had grown steadily to around 25,000.
Then, without any marketing campaign, social media strategy, or mainstream press, something remarkable happened. Word of mouth took over the old-fashioned kind, person to person, book club to book club, church to church.
When Levi was asked whether he had hesitated to publish, he said what he felt at the time with characteristic plainness:
“I’m almost 70. We’re really late in the game.”
He published anyway. He is now America’s highest-selling print author.
What Is Theo of Golden About?
The official description from Simon & Schuster captures the premise in terms that immediately explain why it has connected with so many readers:
“A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.”
The story begins on a spring morning when a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He offers little explanation for where he came from or why he’s there.
But when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the townspeople hang on the walls, he begins buying them, one by one, with the intention of returning each portrait to its subject. He asks only one thing in return: to hear their story.
What follows is a series of encounters that reveal the interior lives of Golden’s residents in full—their grief, their regrets, their unexpected joys, the connections they have quietly built and the ones they have quietly let slip. Through each encounter, Theo begins to confront a tragedy from his own past that he has carried alone for a long time.
Oprah featured the book on her podcast this past July, speaking with Levi about what the novel means:
“Allen reflects on what it means to live a life of love, to find hope and beauty in everyday life and to recognize the goodness in all of us.”
Why Tom Hanks Is the Only Choice
Let’s be direct: there is one actor alive you immediately believe as an 86-year-old Southern gentleman arriving in a small town with a lifetime of sorrow in his eyes and nothing but generosity in his actions.
One actor whose presence on screen makes audiences feel simultaneously warmed and quietly devastated. One actor whose entire career has been a long and distinguished argument that ordinary human goodness is the most cinematic thing in the world.
It is Tom Hanks. It has always been Tom Hanks.
Hanks is no stranger to exactly this kind of material. The Green Mile. News of the World. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—in which he played Mister Rogers, another character defined by his radical, unironic commitment to seeing and honoring the people around him. That last credit in particular is practically the thematic precursor to Theo himself.
Hanks is producing alongside Gil Netter and Gary Goetzman, with Levi executive producing. No director has been attached, and no release date has been set. The deal is still being finalized, and a screenplay will need to be developed. Given the project’s scale and prestige, a 2028 release feels most realistic.
Levi has already teased a sequel, Ellen of Golden, centered on one of the secondary characters from the first novel, which suggests the world of Golden has room to expand well beyond this first film.
A Stranger Arrives In Town Waiting For You To Welcome Him
Theo of Golden sold 3.5 million copies without a publicist, a marketing budget, or anyone in the industry predicting it. It did it the old way: one reader telling another reader, who told another, who told their book club, who told their church group, who told everyone they knew.
This is the kind of book you should read before Hollywood gives it a score and a trailer and two hours of Tom Hanks making you cry in a darkened theater.
Read it the way its first readers did: quietly, without fanfare, entirely on someone’s quiet recommendation. And then you can be the person who tells someone else.
That, it turns out, is how this particular story travels best.
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