The familiar path for a musician who wants to direct runs through a single, carefully chaperoned vanity feature — one swing, then back to the day job. Kid Cudi is refusing that script. Before his debut Doe has even reached audiences, he is already lining up his second film, treating directing as a career to be built at production-line speed rather than a bucket-list credit to check off once.

As Deadline first reported, Scott Mescudi — the two-time Grammy winner who records as Kid Cudi — used a weekend appearance to tease Doe and, in the same breath, confirm a follow-up he says he begins shooting “in a few weeks.” He described that next project, a horror picture shot through with comedy, in blunter terms, calling it “f*ckin gnarly.”

Doe, which Cudi writes, directs and stars in, is the serious statement of the pair. It is an intense addiction drama that unfolds over 24 hours in the life of a man living on the streets of Hollywood, drifting through the encounters that pull him in and out of the cycles of his compulsion. The supporting cast — Mark Webber, Leah McNamara of Normal People, Brandon Scott of Dead to Me and Nope‘s Brandon Perea — orbits a lead role Cudi kept for himself, and he is scoring the film with original songs of his own.

The swerve into horror-comedy is less of a swerve than it looks. Through Mad Solar, the company he founded in 2020 with producer Karina Manashil, Cudi has already bankrolled A24‘s most distinctive recent horror run — Ti West’s X, Pearl and MaXXXine — as well as the Netflix animated feature Entergalactic. Directing a genre film of his own drops him into a lane his producing arm already knows how to finance and sell.

Announcing yourself with two features in a single year is an aggressive gambit for a first-time director, the move of someone who wants to be measured as a filmmaker rather than a musician moonlighting between albums. Whether audiences read the pace as ambition or overreach is the question Doe will have to answer before its successor arrives.

Both films are slated for 2027, with the addiction drama landing first and the horror-comedy following later in the year — a debut’s release and its successor’s shoot now overlapping on the same calendar.

Most artists spend years working up the nerve to call “action” once. Cudi is already scheduling his second “cut” before the first film has a poster.

Tags: production-start, directorial-debut, Doe, Kid Cudi, Mad Solar