Reassuring anxious viewers afraid that Warner Bros.’ long-in-development prequel to The Shining would just be the same movie again—Jack Torrance has always been the caretaker, after all—the film’s producer says in a new interview that things will be different this time, he swears. Whether that’s a good thing depends on whether you’re on Team King or Team Kubrick, but here’s what Overlook Hotel producer James Vanderbilt, perhaps best known as the screenwriter of Zodiac, said in a recent interview with Collider’s Adam Chitwood:
Honestly I think people will really be excited about it, because it’s not like ’20 Years Before The Shining!’. I don’t want to give too much away about the story but the way [screenwriter] Glen [Mazzara] cracked it and the way [director] Mark Romanek has sort of cracked it, it’s completely it’s own film, which I think is super smart. It’s not like, ‘When Scatman Crothers was young, he…’
As well as confirming that Romanek—who previously directed One Hour Photo, Never Let Me Go, and a bunch of music videos, including Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”—is still attached to the project, Vanderbilt’s statement seems to suggest some Troll 2-style “let’s just slap the name of that movie people liked on this unrelated script” foolery on the part of the studio, perhaps with a matching orange rug to tie the rooms together. That script, written by The Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara, is reportedly based on Before The Play, a short story published in Whispers magazine in 1982 describing the spooky adventures of the Overlook’s founder as he creepily built the pre-haunted hotel. Before The Play originally served as the prologue for The Shining but was cut for length by Stephen King, who is known for being extremely particular in his word choices and never writing 350 extra pages of a book.
[via /Film]