Who would have thought that anyone would really have gone forward with a prequel to The Shining. Well Stephen King did, and if the original author writes a story for a prequel, even a partial story, then all bets are off on the iconic film version, surely?

So the question now is who will write the screenplay and bring the story to the big screen? That question has almost been answered and you just need to think of The Walking Dead to see the quality that could well be coming to the screenplay for The Shining prequel, The Overlook Hotel.

Glen Mazzara was the main producer and writer, commonly called the "showrunner" of The Walking Dead after Frank Darabont left the series, and he's been doing a superb job keeping that show on a high level of quality and pumping out some powerful episodes.

He also has some other strong credits to his name and he's been executive producer and writer on The Shield as well, and since that's one of my favourite series ever I'm really excited about what he could bring to the film.

According to the story in The Hollywood Reporter he's in negotiations right now for the role of writer on the prequel to The Shining also known as The Overlook Hotel.

The prequel is to be written from the prologue of The Shining that Stephen King wrote, a section cut from the 1977 novel. That raises some interesting concerns about the rights for the film which Entertainment Weekly have talked about.

Film rights to a novel often include all the notes and any edited sections, so it is feasible that the rights once belonged to Warner Bros. However Stephen King now points out that the rights to the book are returning to him, and that might include the notes and edited out sections, including the prologue.

Saying that though he clearly points out he's not one to take them to court and try and stop them, after all any adaptation of his work is an advertisement for his work, and this adaptation seems as though it's off on the right foot.

Here's what he said:

"There's a real question about whether or not they have the rights to 'Before the Play,' which was the prologue cut from the book - because the epilogue to the book was called 'After the Play.' So they were bookends, and there was really scary stuff in that prologue that wouldn't make a bad movie. Am I eager to see that happen? No I am not. And there's some real question about what rights Warner Bros. does still have. The Shining is such an old book now that the copyright comes back to me. Arguably, the film rights lapse - so we'll see. We're looking into that."

King will let the project continue, although Warner Bros. might have to do a little renegotiation which I think is only fair don't you?

The real question though is what will Glen Mazzara make of the prologue and what kind of film will this become? Undoubtedly there will be elements of the production of The Thing prequel, where there's an analysis of the original film to ensure they include all the relevant references and prequel stories for everything we see and hear there, but will it stand as its own film?