Alfonso Cuarón is being presented with a shining opportunity…
The 52-year-old Mexican filmmaker, who was named Best Director at this year’s Oscars, is reportedly being offered the opportunity to helm a prequel to the horror classic The Shining.
The project is reportedly called “The Overlook Hotel“.
Glen Mazzara, the former showrunner on AMC’s The Walking Dead, is in talks to write the script.
The original film, released in 1980, starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a father who brings his wife and son to an isolated hotel for the winter. Due to an evil presence in the hotel, Torrance goes crazy and becomes violent.
It’s based on a novel of the same name by Stephen King. A follow-up book titled Doctor Sleep was released in 2013.
When asked about the prequel plan earlier this year, King told Entertainment Weekly, “There’s a real question about whether or not they have the rights to Before the Play, which was the prologue cut from the book – because the epilogue to the book was called After the Play. So they were bookends, and there was really scary stuff in that prologue that wouldn’t make a bad movie. Am I eager to see that happen? No I am not.”
“And there’s some real question about what rights Warner Bros. does still have. The Shining is such an old book now that the copyright comes back to me. Arguably, the film rights lapse – so we’ll see. We’re looking into that.” ”I’m not saying I would put a stop to the project, because I’m sort of a nice guy. When I was a kid, my mother said, ‘Stephen if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.’ I have a tendency to let people develop things. I’m always curious to see what will happen. But you know what? I would be just as happy if it didn’t happen.”
