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That Time Stanley Kubrick Made $1.5M Off The Shining Remake

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Love it or hate it, The Shining remake/miniseries set out to tell Stephen King’s legendary story the way King intended it. As I’m sure you’re aware, the author was never a fan of Kubrick’s classic film due to the many changes made to fit the director’s vision. Ultimately, Kubrick started with King’s story and made a Kubrick film out of it, and most agree that this is the superior screen version if not one of the greatest horror films (or even films) of all time.

The Garris project, which King wrote the teleplay for, first aired in 1997. Kubrick died just two years later in 1999, but he was alive when the miniseries was made, and according to Garris, he actually got a nice chunk of change out of it.

weber-shining

I’ve been listening to a ton of back episodes of Adam Green and Joe Lynch’s The Movie Crypt podcast lately. I love hearing the stories from filmmakers and other industry insiders and learning new things about the projects they’ve worked on. Seriously, it’s like crack for horror geeks. I recently listened to one from a couple years ago – episode 18 – which featured Mick Garris, and he noted something that I was completely unaware of despite having devoted a pretty good deal of my time on earth consuming content related to The Shining. I found where he mentioned it in an old Icons of Fright interview as well, but either way, it’s an interesting bit of trivia that a lot of people probably aren’t aware of.

“Kubrick got paid a million and a half dollars for us to be able to do a miniseries, and not many people know that,” Garris told Green. “And King had to sign an agreement saying he would not say anything bad about the Kubrick film. So these are little secrets you’re getting only on The Movie Crypt (laughs).”

According to the miniseries’ trivia section on IMDb, to re-obtain the rights from the Kubrick estate, King had to publicly recant his oft-voiced opinions of Kubrick’s film.

As Garris noted in the podcast, most people  – particularly fans of King’s novel – didn’t really like Kubrick’s film when it came out. It took time for it to truly become recognized as the cinematic masterpiece that it is. By the time the remake was released, it had already achieved that status. Garris himself admitted on The Movie Crypt that he didn’t care much for Kubrick’s film when it was released as he was already a huge fan of King’s novel, but that he had come around to it over the years, recognizing it as a great Kubrick film, even if not a great King adaptation.

King says in the Author’s Note of his sequel novel Doctor Sleep (hat tip to Tasha Robinson), “The Shining is one of those novels people always mention (along with ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, and It) when they talk about which of my books really scared the bejeezus out of them. Plus, of course, there was Stanley Kubrick’s movie, which many seem to remember  – for reasons I have never quite understood – as one of the scariest films they have ever seen. If you have seen the movie but not read the novel, you should note that Doctor Sleep follows the latter, which is, in my opinion, the True History of the Torrance Family.)”

Here’s  a video of King talking about Kubrick and his film, as he discusses Doctor Sleep and jokes about how he’s canceling out the film (another hat tip to Robinson).


“It’s like Stanley Kubrick was like the coldest guy in the universe,” he told the audience. “I outlived him though, didn’t I? Oh man, I even got hit by a car, and I still outlived him.”

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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