Beloved limited series creator Mike Flanagan (“Midnight Mass,” “The Haunting of Hill House”) has already done his share of Stephen King adaptations and will soon be delivering another with early work underway on ambitious “The Dark Tower” TV plans.
Flanagan pulled off a successful Netflix film adaptation of King’s “Gerald’s Game” in 2017, a story once deemed ‘unfilmable’. That led to his directing the high-profile film adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Shining” novel sequel “Doctor Sleep”.
The 2019 film, which acted as both a sequel to the original novel and the Kubrick film adaptation of the original, scored very positive reviews but was considered a box office disappointment – grossing just over $72 million against a $55 million production budget.
Before it opened, Warners had enough confidence in the film they hired Flanagan to script a prequel with the working title “Hallorann” which would’ve focused on the Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) character. That was subsequently cancelled.
While appearing on a recent episode of the Script Apart podcast, Flanagan went into great detail about his plans, revealing that Pennywise the Clown from “IT” would’ve featured in the film’s opening and the whole thing had plenty of in-canon connection:
“I had a great thing for the Dick Hallorann movie, which I was so excited about, which is him as a young man starting in Derry and had a little overlap with IT. 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 (the “Doctor Sleep” group who ingest the Shining’s ‘steam’). 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. 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 237 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.
Unfortunately, the film’s underperformance meant that the spin-off was scrapped pretty quickly:
On Monday they evaluated the box office performance and by Tuesday those (spinoffs) were dead. I understood why they couldn’t proceed on those with the box office that we did. It made sense. It was heartbreaking. It made sense. But yeah, that’s all kind of gone.
That was one of two spin-offs Flanagan had talked about in the lead up to the film’s release, the other being a sequel following the young Abra Stone after her experiences. Unlike the Dick Hallorann project though, that sequel idea never got beyond the early discussion phase.
Flanagan however is not above incorporating plenty of King references and links in his “The Dark Tower” series, whilst HBO Max is working on an “IT” prequel series titled “Welcome to Derry” which shoots this year.