Warner Bros. is making a sequel to The Shining. No one can do this, but especially Akiva Goldsman can’t do this.
Stanley Kubrick directed and wrote the best science fiction movie ever made, the best horror movie ever made, the second best dystopian movie ever made (after Brazil), the best political satire ever made and the second best erotic thriller ever made (after Basic Instinct).
Akiva Goldsman wrote Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot, The Da Vinci Code, I Am Legend, Winter’s Tale, The 5th Wave and the wretched Divergent sequel, Insurgent. His current work is heading a team of writers to pump out sequels for a series of feature-length metal shrapnel montages.
In addition to adapting Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s sequel to his novel The Shining, Goldsman is currently co-writing The Dark Tower movie.
King is well known for his criticisms of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. His chief complaint, that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has no arc, he’s crazy to begin with, is both entirely correct and completely beside the point.
Kubrick’s The Shining is constructed like a demonic puzzle box, it’s every stylistic gesture radiating dread. It’s a movie that inspires religious awe, with a harrowing complexity that’s as irreducible as faith. The Shining inspires reverence. People screen the movie superimposed over itself. There is an entire documentary about The Shining inducing wonderful, crazy ideas in people.
The original novel The Shining featured topiary lions that came to life. The climax centered around a boiler that wasn’t properly maintained. Stephen King is wonderful, but his The Shining is not the definitive version of The Shining.
Goldsman is writing a movie about an alcoholic, adult Danny Torrance taking on psychic vampires who run around the country sucking up Shine. It is an adaptation to a sequel to a novel. It is not a sequel to Kubrick’s The Shining. Nothing can be.
