In the roughly century-long history of cinema, Hollywood has remade, reboot or given the prequel/sequel treatment to many, many films, but there a few that haven’t been touched, for good reason. Stanley Kubrick is a prime example of a filmmaker Hollywood usually stays away from following up, but news hit last summer that Warner Bros. was looking to give his classic adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Shining the prequel treatment.
While we brushed it off as studio pipe dream that would likely never get close to production, following the release of this year’s The Shining doc Room 237, a new update has us a bit worried. According to Deadline, The Walking Dead’s previous showrunner Glen Mazzara has been hired to script the prequel, titled The Overlook Hotel.
There’s no details yet on where this story would go, but it’s oddly timed with the upcoming release of King’s own novel sequel, Dr. Sleep, which follows an adult Danny Torrance. As for the prequel, there’s many areas it could explore (many have assumed we’ll learn the beginnings of Delbert Grady and his family), but what does King himself think of it? Check out a recent quote from EW below.
There’s a real question about whether or not they have the rights to ‘Before the Play,’ which was the prologue cut from the book — because the epilogue to the book was called ‘After the Play.’ So they were bookends, and there was really scary stuff in that prologue that wouldn’t make a bad movie. Am I eager to see that happen? No I am not. And there’s some real question about what rights Warner Bros. does still have. The Shining is such an old book now that the copyright comes back to me. Arguably, the film rights lapse — so we’ll see. We’re looking into that. I’m not saying I would put a stop to the project, because I’m sort of a nice guy. When I was a kid, my mother said, ‘Stephen if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.’ I have a tendency to let people develop things. I’m always curious to see what will happen. But you know what? I would be just as happy if it didn’t happen.
Do you want to see a sequel to The Shining? Is Mazzara the right fight? Where would you want the story to go?