Mike Flanagan's Prequel To Stephen King's THE SHINING Has Been Scrapped
Dammit! Another film project from Warner Bros. that I was excited about has been scrapped! Mike Flanagan, the director of The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep has been developing a prequel that would have put the focus on the character Dick Hallorann.
The character was played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining and Carl Lumbly in Doctor Sleep. Flanagan had been trying so hard to get this film made, but in the end WB just didn’t want to move forward with it and he confirmed that the project was scrapped in response to a fan poster shared on Twitter.
Flanagan said: “We were SO CLOSE. I’ll always regret this didn’t happen.” It makes me sad because this movie should have been made! The people at Warner Bros. are just crazy. 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 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.
I would have loved to see this film get made. It’s a shame that it’ll most likely never happen.