The fact that horror legend Mike Flanagan couldn’t get a prequel to Doctor Sleep proves that the franchise potential of the famous Stephen King adaptation is well and truly dead. Much like their seemingly immortal villains, many horror franchises often refuse to die. Even when all the creative (and profit-making) potential of a series seems to be worn down into the ground. Horror in particular is a genre that somehow still always comes back for one more sequel, prequel, or remake.
Stephen King’s recently remade Children of the Corn is a shining example of this phenomenon. The original 1984 movie prompted eleven sequels despite garnering terrible reviews and still went on to earn a remake despite most of the later installments in the series being released straight-to-video. With such a poorly reviewed series faring so well, it would be reasonable for viewers to assume that a more popular and famous Stephen King story like The Shining could sustain a bigger franchise.
However, this has repeatedly proven not to be the case. Not only was director Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining not an immediate box office success upon its original release, but the many attempts to follow up the movie have proven equally unsuccessful. Midnight Club director Mike Flanagan’s 2019 sequel Doctor Sleep was both a sequel to the Kubrick movie and an adaptation of King's follow-up novel, with the movie ambitiously attempting to bridge the differences between the two texts. This approach didn’t stop Doctor Sleep from failing to connect with audiences upon release. Before Doctor Sleep’s release, Flanagan proposed a prequel that centered around Dick Hallorann’s backstory entitled Hallorann, and the director’s official confirmation that the project is dead is bad news for fans who still see The Shining as a potential series.
Mike Flanagan’s Cancelled Shining Prequel Explained
According to Flanagan, Hallorann would have focused on the early life of Dick Hallorann as he navigated the mysterious psychic gift, the eponymous Shining. Flanagan has not provided many details about the spinoff’s potential plot save for the revelation that it would tie into Hallorann’s Doctor Sleep story about his grandparents and would eventually return to the Overlook. Since Doctor Sleep’s dark Shining sequel failed to make an impact at the global box office upon release, Flanagan confirmed that its potential prequel Hallorann was canceled on Twitter in September 2022.
Why A Dick Hallorann Prequel Could Have Worked
A prequel to The Shining centering on Dick Hallorann could have worked for numerous reasons. For one thing, Hallorann could have brought a more diverse cast to the world of The Shining and would have made the original movie’s working-class ing star the new movie’s leading man. For another, Hallorann would have been able to deepen the lore of the Overlook while still having a compelling central human character to focus its story on. One of the biggest issues with the canceled Shining spinoff series Overlook was that the proposed anthology show would have used the eponymous setting itself to tie together its otherwise disparate stories. While this approach would have made use of the iconic location, a hotel isn’t necessarily as compelling of a character as Dick Hallorann is himself, making the discarded series less promising than Flanagan’s canceled Shining prequel Hallorann.
Why The Shining’s Hallorann Spin-off Was Canceled
A range of reasons could be blamed for the cancelation of Hallorann, among them a lack of audience interest or studio faith in The Shining as a franchise. Per Flanagan, the Shining prequel was canceled because of Doctor Sleep’s lackluster box office performance, while Overlook’s failure to find a home at HBOMax implies this might be an issue for The Shining as an intellectual property more broadly and not just Flanagan’s theatrical spinoffs. Meanwhile, the existence of an Pet Sematary prequel coming to Paramount Plus. While King remains a reliable investment, evidently studios don’t think of The Shining the same way.
Why Doctor Sleep Failed
Doctor Sleep’s box office underperformance appears to be an issue of audience disinterest, as viewers who did see the sequel responded with measured acclaim. While Doctor Sleep was not necessarily seen as an equal to The Shining, the sequel was largely viewed as a worthy follow-up to the original, which is still a huge achievement given the Kubrick movie’s outsized influence on the horror genre in the decades since its release. Thus, the fact that It: Chapter 2. Ultimately, the money made by the two competing King franchises talks louder than their respective reviews.
Why The Shining Can’t Sustain Spin-offs
Ultimately, there are two major reasons why The Shining seems incapable of sustaining any spinoffs even though many of Stephen King’s less popular stories have spawned bigger franchises. For one thing, the story is built on mystery and enigma (particularly Kubrick’s movie adaptation, which has arguably overshadowed the more didactic original novel by now). While Stephen King-scripted Shining TV miniseries offered explanations for most of the plot’s mysteries and made it clear who the story’s ostensible heroes and villains were, Kubrick’s movie is more vague and ambiguous in a way that works for its runtime but doesn’t invite further expansion in prequels, sequels, and spinoffs.
The second reason that The Shining seemingly can’t keep a franchise alive is that the text has two divergent but equally definitive editions. Kubrick’s movie adaptation of The Shining is very different from King’s novel and both would reasonably be seen the as the singular, definitive take on The Shining due to their acclaim and influence. While King might be wrong to claim Kubrick's movie wasn’t a good adaptation of The Shining, he was right to note that it is far from faithful. As a result, anyone viewing Doctor Sleep, Hallorann, or any other follow-up to The Shining can’t be sure which of the two versions of the story this new spinoff is an extension from, and that can be enough to kill interest in the project itself.
