Ken Atchity, Producer of The Meg, Dies at 82

Kenneth Atchity, a literary manager, producer and author, has died at the age of 82. He died on Monday, October 19, 2026, of kidney failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. His longtime business and producing partner Chi-Li Wong told The Hollywood Reporter the news, and Variety also reported his death.

Atchity produced the shark thriller The Meg in 2018, starring Jason Statham, and its sequel Meg 2: The Trench in 2023. His other feature producing credits include Joe Somebody in 2001, Life or Something Like It in 2002, Hysteria in 2011 and Gospel Hill in 2008. He also produced the 1989 telefilm The Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes and the 2010 documentary The Kennedy Detail.

A career across books and film

Across his career Atchity produced more than 30 films and wrote more than 20 books. He negotiated publishing and entertainment deals and published hundreds of additional titles through his own imprint, Story Merchant Books, which he headed.

He also produced 16 romantic telefilms under the Shades of Love banner for cable and video. Those films ran in Canada and on HBO and Cinemax in the United States and were released internationally by Warner Bros.

From the classroom to Hollywood

Kenneth John Atchity was born on January 16, 1944, in Eunice, Louisiana, and was raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Rockhurst High School and attended Georgetown University on an Ignatian Scholarship. At Georgetown he majored in Classics and English and served as editor in chief of the student newspaper The Hoya.

Before Hollywood, Atchity was a professor of English and comparative literature at Occidental College for 17 years. He was a Fulbright professor of American literature at the University of Bologna, and he founded and edited two magazines.

The two careers explain the shape of his later work. A professor who became a literary manager and then a producer could move between the book and the screen versions of the same story, and the output reported by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter shows that range in one record: more than 30 films produced, more than 20 books written, 16 romantic telefilms under one banner, and hundreds of titles published through his own imprint. His best known credit remains The Meg and its sequel, the two films named first in both obituaries published on Saturday, October 24, 2026.

No verbatim tribute quote was included in the reports the hunter could read in full, so this article adds none. The facts above are the full record those reports establish: his birth and schooling, his 17 years at Occidental College, his Fulbright post in Bologna, his film and book output, and his death in Los Angeles on October 19, 2026.