Ken Atchity, the literature professor turned literary manager who produced The Meg and more than 30 other films, died on Monday, October 19, 2026, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 82. His longtime business and producing partner, Chi-Li Wong, said the cause was kidney failure.
Engineer and professor
Atchity was born in Eunice, Louisiana, in 1944 and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He studied at Georgetown University and then at Yale, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and earned a PhD in comparative literature. Along the way he worked as a communications engineer at AT&T Long Lines, where he helped design a network linking NASA’s research centres. He went on to spend 17 years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, rising from assistant professor of English and comparative literature to full professor.
From the classroom to The Meg
Drawn into publishing and film through his work with writers, Atchity became a literary manager, negotiating book and screen deals and championing authors’ work through his company and the imprint Story Merchant Books. With Wong he produced films and television including Joe Somebody, Life or Something Like It, Hysteria, The Lost Valentine, The Kennedy Detail and Gambino. His biggest success came with Steve Alten’s giant-shark novel Meg, which he spent years shepherding to the screen: The Meg, starring Jason Statham, became a global hit in 2018 and was followed by Meg 2: The Trench in 2023. He also wrote more than 20 books, many of them guides for writers.
Family
Atchity is survived by his wife, Kayoko Mitsumatsu; his son, Vincent, and daughter, Rosemary; five grandchildren; and two sisters.