Stephen King Willing To Take Money For SHINING Prequel

We've heard that Warner Bros is considering making a prequel to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Considering that Stephen King, author of the book on which the movie is based, is releasing a sequel to The Shining this year (Doctor Sleep), it seemed a good time to ask him about this. And EW did so. 

"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," King said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "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."

So he's willing to take some money and let them make the movie.

But here's the thing: do they have the rights? I think they do. And not to the deleted material from the book. I think that Warner Bros will be able to create their own prequel just using the stuff that's mentioned in the movie. Nobody cares how close it is to King's deleted prologue, and as long as it gibes with what is mentioned/shown in The Shining, audiences will be happy. I suspect (and I'm no lawyer, obviously. I'm barely even a writer) that Warner Bros could sequelize the shit out of The Shining as long as they stuck to material developed out of the movie itself.