Although my fanboy eyebrow (my fanbrow?) arches skeptically anytime I hear about a remake, reboot, re-imagining or long dormany prequel, this kind of makes sense. Long before the Torrance family moved into the Overlook for a really bad winter, the hotel had a notorious history. In Stephen King's 1977 novel alone, the hotel was the site of illnesses, tragic deaths, the murder-suicide of a family, gangland-style murders, ghost children, snakelike fire hoses, zombie wasps, evil topiaries and, oh yeah, is kind of an extension of Hell.
Mazzara could use a prequel to play with a lot of this material that never made it into Kubrick's film (which also had a funky masquerade swinger party and Indian burial ground)...
Actually Quint from Ain't It Cool makes a good point about the wibbly wobbly time-wimey stuff at The Overlook, which could allow Mazzara to not focus on just one backstory but to connect several.
Along with King's upcoming Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, the Room 237 doc and the Stanley Film Fest (at the "real" Overlook), this seems like yet another stop at the Shining time station which has become so popular as of late.
But just one thought: With the recent critical and ratings successes of Hannibal and Bates Motel -- which have been doing a good job of adding to their source material's back story -- might this Shining prequel actually be cooler as an ongoing, time-warping television series?
-Aaron Sagers