Yeah, The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's peerless adaptation of Stephen King's novel.  The one that is, by any reasonable measure, a perfect movie.

Undaunted by the prospect of creating a film to be unfavorably compared to perfection, Warner Bros. is reportedly looking to develop a potential prequel.  According to an exclusive from 24 Frames, the studio has tasked Laeta Kalogridis and James Vanderbilt to work with Bradley Fischer in coming up with a take on the would-be movie as producers.  If they come up with a prospect to the liking of the Brothers Warner, they would presumably then set about finding a screenwriter to take on the material.

The studio was exploring this possibility quietly, but an unnamed source has gone ahead and blown the doors off that notion.

As a screenwriter, Vanderbilt was the principal architect of The Amazing Spider-Man, and also contributed to the upcoming Total Recall remake, and also worked with David Fincher on the excellent Zodiac.  Fischer also worked on Zodiac as a producer, and his credits include Black Swan and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.  That Dennis Lehane adaptation was written by Kalogridis, who executive produced Avatar and gave James Cameron quite a bit of uncredited screenplay assistance on the movie.  She's currently working with Fischer and Altered Carbon, an adaptation of the Richard K. Morgan novel starring futuristic detective/mercenary Takeshi Kovacs.

Since focusing the prequel on the Torrance clan wouldn't make for a terribly scary story, this The Shining prequel business would probably focus on the Overlook Hotel, a lodging that shines thanks to having been built inadvisedly on an Indian burial ground.  Perhaps it would involve Dick Hallorann, the shiny old dude whose attempt to rescue young Danny and his mom ended with an ax to the chest (spoiler).  Regardless, it's hard to imagine a version of The Shining prequel that actually needs to happen.

King, who was famously unhappy with Kubrick's take on his novel, has been working on a sequel entitled Doctor Sleep for a few years now, and it's rumored that the book will be hitting the shelves within the next year.  That novel will find Danny Torrance, played in the film by Danny Lloyd, as a grown-ass man, probably one who is still dealing not only with his special abilities, but with the fact that his dad tried to murder him as a little kid.

If this prequel to The Shining actually gains some momentum and ends up happening despite the empirical evidence that these kinds of things are, more often than not, bad ideas, then it's difficult to imagine who Warner Bros. could find to handle the inevitable comparisons to Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson.