'It was heartbreaking': Mike Flanagan reveals 'The Shining' spinoffs were shelved as sequel 'Doctor Sleep' failed at Box Office
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: The horror genre is on an all-time high to get the perfect recipe for spooky, or giving a twist to an age-old tale like Mike Flanagan's 2019 released 'Doctor Sleep', which was the sequel to the 1980 'The Shining'. The film is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel of the same name. Although 'The Shining' was a horror movie way ahead of its time and proved to become a horror movie classic, the sequel 'Doctor Sleep' didn't do a great job at the box office.
'Doctor Sleep' was made on a reported budget of $45 million and collected just over $31 million in the US and only $71 million globally. Before the massive failure took place, Flanagan had the idea to create spinoffs about the major characters from 'The Shining', but as soon as the sequel flopped at the box office, the spinoff plans were thrown out the window.
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'I had a great thing for Dick Hallorann movie'
The supposed spinoff was about Dick Hallorann, a fictional character from the 1977 novel 'The Shining'. He has telepathic abilities which he called "the shining" and is the head chef at the Overlook Hotel. The character is played by Carl Lumbly in 'Doctor Sleep'. Flanagan also revealed what his plans were for the "Hallorann" movie, sharing that it would have had connections to other Stephen King properties and how it would have played with the expectations of 'The Shining' Fans. "I had a great thing for Dick Hallorann movie, but I was so excited about, which is him as a young man starting in Derry and had a little overlap with IT," Flanagan said on the Script Apart podcast. "Because in the canon, little Richie Halloran has an encounter with Pennywise as a young man. Then it was gonna be this whole other thing where he joins the army and ends up trying to work in law enforcement in New Orleans in a heavily segregated police department and is up against a kind of a cousin to the True Knot. A killer who is specifically targeting people who shine, and this big battle there. He would win the battle but lose the war and lose the people that he cared about and ended up opting for a quieter life away from all of it and taking this job making meals at this hotel in Colorado."
'I understood why they couldn't proceed'
He continued with, "It was gonna be awesome. They're gonna open with Carl Lumbly as Dick Halloran cleaning up the kitchen and getting ready for the winter because the winter caretaker and his family are due to arrive. They're saying 'You got to be ready to meet them and give them a tour.' Then he goes up to room 217 and has a weird thing with the bathtub and it flashes back to all the stuff in his life. Then at the end of the story we come back to him in the Overlook and they say the caretakers here. He'd come downstairs to meet them in the lobby and you think it's the Torrance family, but it isn't. It's Delbert Grady and his twin daughters and his wife. And you realize you're seeing the beginning of that story."
The 'Midnight Mass' Director also opened up about how swiftly the spinoff idea was scraped by Warner Bros and how he parted ways with them on good terms, "On Monday they evaluated the box office performance and by Tuesday those (spinoffs) were dead." said Flanagan. He continued with, "I understood why they couldn't proceed on those with the box office that we did," Flanagan added. "It made sense. it was heartbreaking. It made sense. But yeah, that's all kind of gone."