All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Still, in times of social distancing and quarantine, it’s nice to see some work is getting done behind the scenes at HBO Max. Indeed, the incoming streaming service from WarnerMedia announced Thursday a bonanza of new shows they’re developing with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions—with Overlook, a spinoff of Stephen King’s The Shining, at the top of the list.
Apparently intended to be a similar dive into the horror-filled imaginings of King as Hulu and Warner Bros. Television’s two seasons of Castle Rock on Hulu, Overlook is described as a horror thriller inspired by and featuring iconic characters who appeared in King’s 1977 novel about a haunted resort in the Colorado Rockies. Or as WarnerMedia deigns it, “The most famous haunted hotel in American fiction.” Intriguingly, the series has already been ordered, with King attached, even though no one has been officially hired to write or showrun the project. However, Deadline reports that Castle Rock co-creator and executive producer Dustin Thomason and co-executive producer Scott Brown are in negotiations with taking over writing duties.
An Overlook television series is not necessarily shocking news. For years Warner Bros. has wanted to capitalize on the popularity of King’s story—and more specifically Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of it, which WB produced—with a prequel about the Overlook hotel. Prior to King publishing a decades-later sequel, Doctor Sleep, the studio was trying to develop an Overlook movie for the better part of a decade. Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo, Never Let Me Go) was even hired to write and direct a prequel about the construction of the Overlook and its opening night, which he described as like The Revenant with its Western tone… plus ghosts.
While that proved too costly for WB in the end, particularly after Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep movie flopped at the box office last November, continuing the still relatively popular franchise on streaming makes financial sense. The Shining is still a familiar intellectual property, and while Doctor Sleep underperformed, seeing if the allure of the Overlook can transfer to subscriptions is a burgeoning business model, similar to Disney transforming its Obi-Wan Kenobi spinoff movie into a spinoff Disney+ series.