DOCTOR SLEEP Director Offers Fascinating Story Details About His Scrapped Dick Hallorrann Spinoff and Its Connection To IT
Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan was planning on making a spinoff movie that would have given us the story of Dick Hallorrann. It would have served as a prequel to Stephen King’s The Shining and it’s a story I would have loved to see Flanagan tell, but unfortunately, Warner Bros. opted not to move forward with it, which is a shame. Now the filmmaker is sharing some cool details about what he was looking to do with it!
When previously talking about his plans for the film, the filmmaker said: "The idea was to open with him as [Doctor Sleep actor] 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. But I don’t know. I don’t know what we'd do with it. I love it, though, and it was something we were real excited about. So I hope there’s a new life for it out there somewhere."
Dick Hallorrann was the head cook at the Overlook hotel and he befriended Danny Torrance in The Shining. During an interview with Script Apart, Flanagan talked about the film and revealed that it would have had a connection to It.
"I had a great thing for Dick Hallorann movie, but I was so excited about, which is him as a young man starting in Derry and had a little overlap with IT. Because in the canon, little Richie Halloran has an encounter with Pennywise as a young man. Then it was gonna be this whole other thing where he joins the army and ends up trying to work in law enforcement in New Orleans in a heavily segregated police department and is up against a kind of a cousin to the True Knot. A killer who is specifically targeting people who shine, and this big battle there. He would win the battle but lose the war and lose the people that he cared about and ended up opting for a quieter life away from all of it and taking this job making meals at this hotel in Colorado.
He goes on to talk about how the story would have played out from how it opens to how it ends with the caretakers of the hotel arriving. Those caretakers would have been Delbert Grady with his wife and twin daughters. Here’s what he said:
"It was gonna be awesome. They're gonna open with Carl Lumbly as Dick Halloran cleaning up the kitchen and getting ready for the winter because the winter caretaker and his family are due to arrive. They're saying 'You got to be ready to meet them and give them a tour.' Then he goes up to room 217 and has a weird thing with the bathtub and it flashes back to all the stuff in his life. Then at the end of the story we come back to him in the Overlook and they say the caretakers here. He'd come downstairs to meet them in the lobby and you think it's the Torrance family, but it isn't. It's Delbert Grady and his twin daughters and his wife. And you realize you're seeing the beginning of that story."
Damn! That would’ve been such an awesome film! I hate that Warner Bros. passed on that movie! What a great concept! But, because Doctor Sleep didn’t perform well at the box office, all the spinoff movies that Flanagan was planning were dead. Flanagan said:
"I understood why they they couldn't proceed on those with with the box office that we did. It made sense. It was it was heartbreaking. It made sense. But yeah, that's all kind of gone."
It still irks me that Doctor Sleep didn’t do well at the box office because it was such a great movie!