‘The Overlook Hotel’: Mark Romanek Reflects On the Ambitious ‘Shining’ Prequel He Almost Made

Years before Mike Flanagan took us back to the Overlook Hotel in last year’s Doctor Sleep, it had been announced that One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek would be directing a prequel to The Shining for Warner Bros., which was set to be titled The Overlook Hotel. This was back in 2014, though the project obviously never ended up coming to fruition.

At the time, former “The Walking Dead” showrunner Glen Mazzara had turned in his draft for the prequel story, based on Stephen King’s original prologue to The Shining.

It was reported back in 2014, “The film will tell the origin story of the Overlook Hotel through the eyes of its first owner, Bob T. Watson. A robber baron at the turn of the 20th century, Watson scaled the remote peaks of the Colorado Rockies to build the grandest resort in America, and a place he and his family would also call home.”

So what happened to Mark Romanek’s The Overlook Hotel, you ask? The filmmaker reflected on the unmade project in a chat with Collider this week.

“It’s a great script I think,” Romanek told the site. “It was based on a prologue to the novel that Stephen King wrote and then that prologue was cut for length. And so it’s based on Stephen King. It’s not just some thing somebody made up, and it’s more of an origin story… almost like a Western or a wilderness story, going back to the construction and the desecration of the Indian burial grounds, and the construction of the Overlook Hotel and to its meaning to its opening night.”

He continued, “The problem is it’s really expensive. It kind of reads like The Revenant or Heaven’s Gate or something and I think they wanted to try Doctor Sleep to see if—my impression is they wanted to see if there was this sort of Shining universe that would have financial life through them, or artistic life with the audience. And I think Doctor Sleep did just sort of okay, and given that our script is so costly, it’s a little dead in the water right now. But you never know, it’s a weird business. It’s a very good script. I’m proud of the script.”

Romanek also noted, “I was stupidly undaunted by its relationship to The Shining, because it takes place decades and decades before and there’s very little specific visual crossover. It was just, I thought, a really great story, based on Stephen King.”

From what we gather, Warner Bros. was indeed hopeful that Doctor Sleep would pave the way for more chapters in the saga of The Shining, but the film’s unfortunate under-performance at the box office may have spelled the end of those plans. For now, at least…