Warner Bros. had high expectations for Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan’s 2019 sequel to the classic The Shining. Such high expectations, they even hired Flanagan to write a prequel to the film that would center on the character Dick Hallorann, who was played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining and Carl Lumbly in Doctor Sleep. But then Doctor Sleep was released to underwhelming box office and the prequel Hallorann was scrapped. Yesterday, a fan poster for a Hallorann-centric Shining film caught Flanagan’s eye and inspired him to tweet, “We were SO CLOSE. I’ll always regret this didn’t happen. Because of DOCTOR SLEEP’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.“
Collider also shared a quote from a 2020 CinemaBlend interview with Flanagan in which he said, “Hallorann was always more about Dick as a younger man learning about the shining. And 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.“
A Hallorann prequel sounds like it could be a lot of fun if it was in the right hands, like Flanagan’s, so it’s unfortunate that the box office failure of Doctor Sleep seems to have ensured that we’re never going to get it.
Would you like to see Flanagan get the chance to make Hallorann? Share your thoughts on this scrapped Shining project by leaving a comment below.