Warner Bros. is closer than ever to making me cry like that time I stepped on and broke my Rygar Nintendo cartridge, as it is rumored that former The Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara is in talks to write a prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 amazing, classic, wonderful, timelessly terrifying movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining.
Why would Warner want to do such a thing? Because this is America, and in America we take things that are awesome and we destroy them out of greed, because we simply can. Unfortunately for Warner, there’s still a little matter of whether or not the studio owns the rights to the source material, a part of the novel that focused on the history of the Overlook Hotel that was cut. Warner says they own the rights, while King says they don’t.
WHO YA GOT???
Here’s what King told us in an interview about Doctor Sleep, The Shining sequel he’ll publish in September:
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. (Via EW)
King also said that he’s not even sure that he’d put a stop to the prequel if he proves that he actually has the rights, because he’s a “nice guy”. I believe that’s his way of saying, “Pay up, bitches.” Either way, I won’t waste my energy by freaking out just yet. Not as long as I can just post this GIF and be happy.