Mike Flanagan has revealed why his prequel to The Shining was scrapped by Warner Bros. The Haunting of Hill House creator took to Twitter recently to share a fan-made poster for the never-made flick, which would've centered on Danny's buddy Dick Hallorann, and explained that the lackluster reception to Doctor Sleep was the reason for the movie's cancellation.
"We were SO CLOSE. I'll always regret this didn't happen," the filmmaker began, before a follower asked him why it didn't happen. "Because of DOCTOR SLEEP's box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it," he replied. "They control the rights, so that was that."
Because of DOCTOR SLEEP’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.September 18, 2022
Combining Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Stephen King's 2013 follow-up novel, Doctor Sleep sees adult Danny Torrance still wrestling with his traumatic experiences at the Overlook Hotel. After decades of suppressing his Shine, present-day Danny (Ewan McGregor) is forced to embrace his powers again when a young girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) makes telepathic connection with him. Together, the pair try to stop Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and her murderous cult of Shine-consuming almost-immortals.
Late actor Scatman Crothers plays Dick Hallorann, the Overlook's head chef, in The Shining and unlike in the book in which it's based, the film sees Jack Nicholson's Jack kill Hallorann with an axe. In Doctor Sleep, Carl Lumbly brings the character to life, as he appears to Danny as a ghost in his times of need.
"Hallorann was always more about Dick as a younger man learning about the Shining," Flanagan previously told ReelBlend Podcast about his planned prequel. "The Doctor Sleep novel tees up a prologue for it perfectly with the story of his grandmother and his grandfather. Which he tells a little bit of in this (movie). But the idea was to open with him as Carl Lumbly, and then to find a way to go back into the past and kind of tell this other story that inevitably would, very much in the way Doctor Sleep did, inevitably bring us back to a familiar hotel."
The proposed prologue would've explained how Hallorann learned how to use imaginary "lockboxes" to keep vengeful spirits at bay from his grandmother – a technique has passes on to Danny – after being haunted by his abusive granduncle, Andy.
While he may regret not being able to make his prequel to The Shining a reality, Flanagan certainly hasn't been twiddling his thumbs in recent years. In the near future, he'll release The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix – both of which star frequent collaborators of his, including Lumbly, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, and Henry Thomas.
