Scrapped Doctor Sleep Spinoff including Pennywise, Details Creator by IT

As he prepares to return to Stephen King’s world, Mike Flanagan describes how he was scrapped doctor sleep Spin-off would have been there ITis Pennywise the clown. The 2019 film doubled as an adaptation of King’s glowing Sequel novel and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the previous novel, which explores an adult Danny Torrance confronting a group of psychic vampires known as the True Knot and his own childhood trauma. Despite positive reviews, doctor sleep was viewed as a box-office disappointment, grossing just over $72 million against a production budget of $55 million.

While he was in a recent episode of the script apart Podcast that Mike Flanagan thought about doctor sleep‘s underperforming at the box office and its scrapped spin-offs. The director reveals that one of them, which focuses on Carl Lumbly’s Dick Hallorann, would have played a role IT‘s Pennywise, in its opening, explains how the canon of King’s novels made the connection possible and details how the show would tie in with it The glow‘s Overlook Hotel. See what Flanagan shared below:

I had a great fondness for the Dick Hallorann film which I was so excited to see starting in Derry as a young man and had a bit of an overlap with IT. Because in canon, little Richie Halloran has an encounter with Pennywise as a young man. Then it was to be this very different thing where he joins the army and ends up trying to work law enforcement in New Orleans in a strictly segregated police department and going up against some sort of cousin of the True Knot. A killer who specifically targets people who shine and that big fight there.

He would win the battle but lose the war and lose the people he cared about and eventually decided to live a quieter life away from it all and took this job of preparing meals at this Colorado hotel. It was going to be great. They will open with Carl Lumbly as Dick Halloran cleaning up the kitchen and getting ready for the winter because the winter caretaker and his family will be arriving. They say, “You have to be willing to meet them and give them a tour.”

Then he goes upstairs to room 237 and has a weird thing with the bathtub and it flashes back to all the things in his life. Then we come back to him in the Overlook at the end of the story and they say the caretakers here. He came down to meet them in the lobby and you think it’s the Torrance family but it’s not. It’s Delbert Grady and his twin daughters and his wife. And you realize you’re seeing the beginning of this story. On Monday they assessed box office performance and on Tuesday these (spinoffs) were dead. I understood why they couldn’t continue with the box office we did. It made sense. It was heartbreaking. It made sense. But yes, it’s all gone somehow.

Related: Each Stephen King film franchise, ranked from worst to best

Could Flanagan get another crack at his Doctor Sleep spinoffs?

The Dick Hallorann-centric project was one of two doctor sleep Spin-offs Flanagan discussed leading up to the film’s release. The other would have been a sequel to the 2019 film and would have further explored Abra Stone following her experiences with the True Knot and Danny and continued to get to grips with her Shining skills. Unlike the other one developed under the working title hallo rannthe Abra-focused spin-off never got further than Flanagan and confirmed that he got the king’s blessing on his idea.

While the film’s underperformance at the box office has seemingly killed the projects’ chances, there may still be a glimmer of hope for them doctor sleep Spinoffs that will come to fruition in the future. Flanagan is currently developing a new one Dark Tower Adaptation, a novel series that has ties to a variety of other King novels, including IT, as the manner of being Pennywise the Clown continues to be explored in the fantasy epic. Given Flanagan’s clear love of King’s materials, it seems likely he would include these Easter eggs to set up potential crossovers.

Flanagan even hinted at such plans for his Dark Tower series recently, suggesting there may be room for the likes of Ewan McGregor’s Danny Torrance doctor sleep, among other. With no home streaming set for the show just yet, it would be interesting to see if Warner Bros. Discovery will reunite with Flanagan for its show, especially considering that IT precursor Welcome to Derry recently landed a series order with HBO Max, showing her continued interest in King’s work.

More: 6 reasons why Welcome to Derry is more exciting than Chapter 3Source: script apart