DOCTOR SLEEP Director Mike Flanagan Still Hopes to Make His Dick Hallorann Spinoff Film

The majority of people who saw director Mike Flanagan’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep seemed to love it. The movie perfectly blended The Shining sequel with King’s story and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Unfortunately, for some reason, not many people went out to see the movie and the box office ended up being a disappointment for the studio.

Flanagan and Warner Bros. were working on a spinoff film that would have focused on the character Dick Hallorann, who appeared in both The Shining and Doctor Sleep. The character was played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining and Carl Lumbly in Doctor Sleep. That project didn’t end up moving forward, but Flanagan is hoping that he will get to make it one day with the help of HBO Max.

During a recent interview with the ReelBlend podcast, the filmmaker said:

"A lot of the plans and the enthusiasm that we had for Hallorann, and for other things as well kind of coming off of this, cooled off very understandably with the studio after [Doctor Sleep] was released. But I think we're learning [about] that paradigm shift between theatrical and streaming that everyone has seen coming in the industry. I think people thought they had another five years to really adjust the studio model to change with those times. I think it’s already happened. And I would expect, you'll hear a lot of people at [Warner Bros.] say the same. A movie that would potentially have performed theatrically even five years ago, it won't anymore, and streaming has changed everything.

"So I think, as more people find this film and as it hopefully continues to perform well on HBO Max, in particular, where it's really kind of popping, that, I think, opens up a number of avenues for other stories we could tell. And Hallorann is absolutely something that I would love to put energy back into."

When talking about the concept for the film, Flanagan 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 Hallorann has an interesting history that not only connects to The Shining stories, but also to Stephen King’s It. Here are some details on the character:

Not much was known of Dick's early life, except that he likely was born in New Hampshire. As a little boy he mentioned he could hold conversations with his paternal grandmother without either of them moving their lips. When he grew up he joined the US Army and was eventually assigned to be a cook for Easy Company, a New Hampshire-based unit. Dick Halloran parlayed his cooking skills for the rest of his life, where he partnered with other men in his unit into starting up The Black Spot, which was a nightclub that mainly catered to black soldiers. Later he would get a job at the Overlook Hotel, eventually becoming their head chef.

In Doctor Sleep Dick shares his story with Danny about his paternal grandmother, Rose Hallorann, who shares Dick's Shine, and her brother, Andy:

Dick refers to them as "White Grandma" and "Black Grandpa" respectively (due to the color of their souls, not their skin color.) Black Grandpa would routinely mentally, physically and sexually abuse Dick. These abuses were kept secret and suspicions were allayed, because Black Grandpa had threatened Dick with a fairy-tale child-snatcher, Charlie Manx, so Dick never told his parents or White Grandma, and Black Grandpa had promised his fortune as a coffin-maker to Dick's family. However, after he dies, Black Grandpa leaves his fortune to a black orphanage in Alabama instead. Dick then has several Shining encounters with his Black Grandpa's naked and sexualized spirit, which beckons Dick to fornicate with him.

Dick to tell his White Grandma about these apparitions, she having already discovered Black Grandpa's abuses after his death. She teaches him how to "lock" bad shines like Black Grandpa into a mental lockbox. Dick passes this knowledge down to Danny in the form of a physical lockbox.

I would love to see this movie get made one day! But who knows. Warner Bros. recently teamed up with J.J. Abrams and King to develop a series inspired by The Shining titled Overlook, which “explores the untold, terrifying stories of the most famous haunted hotel in American fiction.” Like the Hulu series Castle Rock, “Overlook is named after an iconic location from King’s horror universe. In another parallel.”

I’m excited about that series, but there’s certainly still room for Flanagan to tell his Hallorann story!