They are making a prequel to The Shining called Overlook Hotel and the man that Warner Bros. wants to direct the film is Mark Romanek. While the idea of a Shining prequel is not that exciting, the thought that Romanek could direct the film is very exciting.
The project has been in the pipeline for a while now, with former Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara writing the original draft for the movie. Overlook Hotel will head back to the original owner of the hotel, Bob T. Watson, and show how he built the hotel and resort, a place that eventually became a haunted house of horrors.
The idea was the original prologue to Stephen King’s book, which he cut out. The idea though is not to adapt this as a Stephen King work but to make it a prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s Shining movie, a film that King still openly shows distaste for. King has often said that he doesn’t understand why people love the movie, although much of his displeasure comes from the changes to the aesthetics of his story.
King’s story was about an evil structure that turned a troubled man into a psychopath. The movie is about a bad man who gets worse in the claustrophobic hotel.
However, Mark Romanek is an amazing choice to direct the movie. A music video director for three decades, Romanek only has three movies to his credit but two of those are damn good movies. One Hour Photo, released in 2002, was one of the first movies to show that Robin Williams could be a really creepy and demented character and Never Let Me Go, released in 2010, was one of the best science fiction movies made in a long time.
Stephen King returned to the story last year with the sequel Doctor Sleep. That book picked up many years later with Dan Torrance, the son of Jack, as a recovering alcoholic scarred by the days in that hotel many years before. When he learns that there are more people like him, with the power of The Shining, he finds himself swept into action to protect a young girl from a group of people who feed off children with the shining powers.
Warner Bros. is also planning to adapt that great book into a film as well.
