Mark Romanek reflects on his prequel to The Shining that never was

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Last month it was announced that J.J. Abrams would be developing several projects for the HBO Max streaming service, one of which was Overlook, a horror-thriller series which is inspired by and will feature iconic characters from Stephen King's "The Shining" as it "explores the untold, terrifying stories of the most famous haunted hotel in American fiction." Overlook isn't the first project to focus on the infamous hotel, as Mark Romanek (ONE HOUR PHOTO) was once slated to helm a prequel film centered on the hotel which was slated to tell its origin story through the eyes of its first owner, Bob T. Watson, a robber baron who scaled the remote peaks of the Colorado Rockies to build the grandest resort in America, a place where he and his family could call home.

While speaking with ComicBook.com, Mark Romanek spoke about the creation of the prequel movie which had been written by Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead). "We weren't trying to milk this classic genre movie for just 'Let's milk it for something,'" Romanek said. "There was a prologue that Stephen King wrote for the novel originally when it was published in 1977, and it was cut for length. So there's a brief prologue that he wrote that just is fascinating material and a fascinating basis for a new story." The project got the blessing from Stephen King himself, but the story wound up being a little too epic (expensive) for Warner Bros. to move forward with at the time.

What it finally got down to was, really, an origin story. It was more like a wilderness tale set in the very early twentieth century. I can't remember the name of the character that built the hotel now, but it's the desecration of the Indian burial ground and the construction of the Overlook Hotel in the deep wilderness in 1910, and it builds to the grand opening of the hotel. It was epic, and I think the problem really was just the budget. They weren't confident enough that there was going to be this, what the studios would call a 'Shining universe' that they were going to start building, to justify the cost. And the film is just, by nature of the story building, this massive hotel and creating a period piece, and it seemed too costly to them. And that was really the thing that sort of killed it, unfortunately.

Although Warner Bros. chose not to move forward with the prequel, they later returned to the story with Mike Flanagan's DOCTOR SLEEP, which followed the now adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) as he continued to deal with the trauma he suffered at the Overlook Hotel decades ago.