He successfully adapted Gerald's Game by the author, and now director Mike Flanagan has won the chance to make a film based on one of Stephen King's more recent, and more controversial books – Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining.
Warner Bros. optioned the 2013 book back in 2016, and has been slowly developing it since then with Akiva Goldsman writing a script draft. Thanks to the success of It, the studio is pushing Doctor Sleep on to the fast track, hiring Flanagan to re-write and direct. Sleep's story catches up with Danny Torrance, seen as a child in Shining, burdened with the trauma of his younger days and showing worrying signs of his father. With a lingering rage and a drinking problem that dulls his pain as well as his supernatural shining powers, he finds they return when he opts to go sober and uses his gifts to help those dying at a local hospice.
After forming a psychic connection with a young girl who boasts similar abilities, he discovers a scary group targeting those who have the powers, improving their own by inhaling the "steam" that comes off people with the shine during painful deaths. King famously didn't care for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of the original, so hopefully he'll be happier with Flanagan's work here. And it's not the only Overlook Hotel-related project out there: Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Romanek have both been attached to a prequel, imaginatively titled The Overlook Hotel, which remains in limbo.
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