When IFC Films releases Room 237 later this year, the excellent documentary exploring Stanley Kubrick‘s 1980s classic The Shining, there is bound to be some rejuvenated interest in the masterpiece I consider to be my favorite horror film of all-time. But us fans aren’t the only ones that are looking at the film in a new light, as new reports indicate Warner Bros. is actually pondering a prequel to feature.
LA Times reports that the studio, while still in the “very early stage,” has brought on writer/producer Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Shutter Island), along with Bradley Fischer and James Vanderbilt to try and come up with a new take on the early life of Jack Nicholson‘s character of Jack Torrance. The tormented man is one of the best horror characters to-date and this one would take a look at what led him to that state. As we know, Stephen King is also supposedly expanding The Shining universe, with a book sequel called Doctor Sleep, which follows the once-little Danny Torrence as a NYC hospital worker, but this is of course unrelated.
As Stanley Kubrick would have recently celebrated his 84th birthday, I can only imagine he’d be rolling in this grave with this news. We saw this year that despite being an enjoyable blockbuster, the worst aspect of Prometheus was how it tried so hard to tie into Alien in a prequel form. If this was a supremely loose prequel, I could see it possibly working, but with Nicholson clearly not being involved and Kubrick long gone, I can’t get behind this one.
Were you bugged that The Shining didn’t give you enough backstory? Do you want a prequel?