Doctor Sleep Director’s Shining Prequel Movie Story Details Revealed

Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan reveals story details about his planned prequel to The Shining. After bringing the supposedly unfilmable Gerald’s Game to screens in 2017, Flanagan got his second chance to adapt Stephen King when he was tapped to direct the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep.

Set decades after the events of The Shining, Doctor Sleep follows a much older and still very haunted Danny Torrance as he meets another youngster blessed with the Shine, while also learning of the mysterious band of immortals known as the True Knot who prey on those with the Shine. Starring Ewan McGregor as Torrance and Rebecca Ferguson as the evil Rose the Hat, Doctor Sleep pleased a lot of hardcore King fans but unfortunately was not a hit at the box office, grossing only $72 million on a reported budget of $45 million. However, Doctor Sleep has reportedly been performing well on streaming, especially after the release of a longer cut that fleshes out the film’s story and adds more to the mythology of the Shine and the True Knot.

Even with Doctor Sleep finding new life on streaming, chances of a follow-up movie seem slim at the moment. However, director Flanagan is holding out hope that he’ll get to revisit the Overlook Hotel with a prequel film focused on the character of Dick Hallorann, the man who taught Danny about the Shine in the original movie and turned up again in Doctor Sleep to counsel an older Torrance (this is a separate project from the Overlook Hotel prequel series set for HBO Max with J.J. Abrams as executive producer). Speaking to CinemaBlend, Flanagan gave some details about his planned Shining prequel:

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 [Doctor Sleep actor] Carl Lumbley, 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.

As revealed in Doctor Sleep, Hallorann’s own early experiences with the Shine were as traumatic as Danny’s, as they involved Dick being abused by his “Black Grandpa” Andy (actually his grandmother’s brother). Also revealed in Doctor Sleep was Dick’s connection to his grandmother Rose, who like him possessed the Shine and taught him to use his power. That very dark backstory evidently would be explored more thoroughly in Flanagan’s Hallorann, starring a young actor as a younger version of Dick, if it ever gets made.

But of course that is a big “if” given the current state of the movie business and in light of the soft box office numbers for Doctor Sleep. As Flanagan himself points out in his CinemaBlend interview, streaming could be the only hope for his Hallorann project, as movie studios continue to move away from releasing mid-budget films in theaters and turn more and more to at-home alternatives. It definitely sounds like Flanagan has very specific and intriguing ideas for another prequel to The Shining, as the universe of King continues to fascinate and inspire him (especially that particular haunted hotel that he can’t seem to let go of). That said, it’s fair to ask how deep the Shining well really goes, and if audiences are really that interested in finding out more about Dick Hallorann, an interesting but ultimately somewhat minor character in the larger King universe.

Source: CinemaBlend

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