IT's Pennywise would've appeared in The Shining crossover Doctor Sleep creator says
Topics: Stephen King
Ben Thompson
Featured Image Credit: Warner Bros./Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Stephen King
Pennywise may have terrified audiences in the two IT films released in 2017 and 2019 - but they weren't supposed to be his only appearances on the big screen.
The terrifying clown had actually been scheduled to make an appearance in a crossover with another Stephen King property.
Released in 2019, Doctor Sleep served as a long awaited sequel to the horror classic The Shining.
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It followed an adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) as he fights against a group of psychic vampires called the True Knot, who prey on children with psychic abilities.
Upon release, the film received generally positive reviews, although its $72 million box office gross was considered a disappointment by the studio.
Mike Flanagan, who directed the film, recently opened up about a scrapped Doctor Sleep spinoff that would have featured an appearance from the shape-shifting Pennywise.
Flanagan had intended to make a film based on Dick Hallorann, the head chef at the Overlook hotel, who also has 'the Shining' just like Danny.
Speaking on the Script Aircast podcast, the director said: "I had a great thing for the Dick Hallorann movie, which I was so excited about, which is him as a young man starting in Derry and had a little overlap with IT.
"Because in the canon, little Richie Halloran has an encounter with Pennywise as a young man.
"Then it was gonna be this whole other thing where he joins the army and ends up trying to work in law enforcement in New Orleans in a heavily segregated police department and is up against a kind of a cousin to the True Knot.
"A killer who is specifically targeting people who shine, and this big battle there."
The proposed spin-off was one of two movies that Flanagan had hoped to make after Doctor Sleep.
However, any chance of the spinoffs happening was pretty much destroyed after the film's low box office performance.
Shame, really.
Flanagan's other film idea would have revolved around Abra Stone, the young girl at the centre of the original movie, as she comes to grip with her telepathic abilities.
However, the director is continuing to work on films based on Stephen King's work, with a new adaptation of Kings' The Dark Tower currently in the works.
That series already contains ties to novels like IT, as Pennywise's species is further explored in the fantasy epic.
And with the possibility of a HBO show also looking to focus on the inhabitants of Derry, we might be getting much more of Pennywise than we initially anticipated.