The makers of this clearly didn't understand Donnie Darko.
The thing is with the first Donnie Darko was, it was based around him having died to the jet engine from the future and so it would cause the world to end, because the sequence of events (flooding the school, killing frank etc) wouldn't happen and so neither would the jet engine, and so if that happened the world would've ended due to a hole in the space time contiuum. And so they start off by saying 'IN THE LAST ONE DONNIE DARKO DIED', true enough you see him dying at the end but that was just showing you the alternate reality, they all wake up and they all seem to know it's the end of the world, but as I said that was just the alternate reality, the real reality was at the start where he was out when the jet engine hit his room and thus allowed it once again to go back in time. *gasps for breath*
therefore if they are trying to say Donnie had died in the last one they clearly didn't understand the concept because in the reality in which Donnie dies, the world ends.
Dumb hollywood.