Saving the historic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which is a two-hour drive from Cheyenne, wasn’t intuitive.
It involved leaning into something that former hotel owners had feared would drive guests away — its haunted connections to the cult classic horror movie, “The Shining.”
Now, owner John Cullen is about to lean even further into that connection. Cullen has inked a $400 million dollar deal that will put the Stanley Hotel under a newly formed nonprofit, as well as fund a multimillion-dollar expansion of the iconic property he once saved from ruin.
The expansion will not only include more rooms, but a 65,000-square-foot event and film center with an almost 900-seat auditorium and a horror film museum that will be curated by Hollywood’s Blumhouse Productions.
The $400 million deal includes money for buying out the hotel. It was not clear at the time of posting this story how much of the $400 million is for the buyout and how much for the expansion.
The hotel’s ownership will transfer to Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority (CECFA) and a newly formed nonprofit, the Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education (SPACE).
SPACE will be led by Cullen, and it will own and operate the 41-acre, 140-room hotel complex for CECFA.
Not The First Deal
This particular deal follows another announced in 2023 that never came about to sell the hotel to an Arizona nonprofit, the Community Finance Corp. The latter was to have acted as a middleman, handling both issuance and retirement of the bonds.
That deal quietly faded away, after which the Colorado Legislature amended the law that had created CECFA in 1981, allowing it to not only make loans for arts and cultural facilities, but to also form a nonprofit that could own and manage them for CECFA, a new role that it has not had before.
Once the $400 million in bonds are retired, that should give CECFA an ongoing revenue stream that can support future schools, as well as arts and cultural programs.
To date, CECFA has helped 300 organizations across Colorado secure $7.6 billion in low-interest, tax-exempt bonds for schools, student housing, museums, and more.
More Star Power
The sale of the Stanley Hotel dovetails with larger efforts that Colorado has been making to put itself on Hollywood’s radar and nab a larger role for itself in the movie industry. Those efforts, so far, have been largely successful.
Colorado has already landed the Sundance Institute’s Directors Lab, which relocated to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in 2024, and will be held there again in 2025.
The invitation-only Directors Lab is a prestigious training program that has included participants like Quentin Tarantino in 1991. Tarantino later came to Colorado to film his movie “The Hateful Eight” near Telluride.
CECFA Executive Director Mark Heller has told Cowboy State Daily previously that it’s hoped the Directors Lab will “kick off a longer-term collaboration” and that he believes the film center will make Estes Park an even stronger tourist destination.
“It’s a very big project and it’s very exciting,” Heller said then. “The whole standing campus up there is a historic district, which by definition is a cultural property, which falls within our statutory scope.”
Colorado more recently nabbed the Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford in Salt Lake City in 1978, beating out much larger cities like Atlanta, Cincinnati and Louisville. It will be relocating to Boulder in 2027.
The Sundance Institute, which owns the festival, will run dozens of workshops for filmmakers during the event, which annually attracts between 40,000 to 50,000 visitors. Attendees spend on average $138 million.
The Stanley Hotel is already being considered as a potential venue for some of the Sundance Film Festival’s programming in 2027.
Saving The Stanley
The Stanley Hotel has made a name for itself among horror fans by leaning into hits haunted connections with Stephen King’s best-selling novel “The Shining.”
King told the story often of how his novel was inspired by a 1974 stay at the then-dilapidated hotel in Estes Park. It was so bad, it was creeping him out. In fact, he awoke from a nightmare while there, in which his son was chased around the hotel by the antique firehoses on the wall.
The author, who’d been in a slump after his bestselling novel “Carrie,” got up to smoke a cigarette on the balcony. By the time he’d finished the smoke, he had all the bones of a great new thriller set in his mind.
That book was eventually titled “The Shining,” and then Stanley Kubrick turned it into a cult classic movie of the same name.
While former owners of The Stanley Hotel took pains to avoid this connection to “The Shining,” even going so far as to ask the movie makers to change the number of the Overlook Hotel room from 217 to 237. They were afraid no one would want to rent their biggest and best suite anymore.
But Cullen, who had bought the hotel in 1996 to try and save it, decided this connection was more advantage than disadvantage and started actively promoting it instead. Now thousands of fans flock to the venue to stay in its most haunted rooms, and 217, the suite where King stayed, is among the most popular rooms.
Cullen added a number of tours that focus around the hotel and its connection to “The Shining” and has added other features that dive into a bit of the macabre, including the world’s first International Cryogenic Museum, which houses the body of the original Frozen Dead Guy Days star himself, Bredo Morstol.
More On The Film Center
The film center at the Stanley Hotel isn’t just going to be a space for watching and celebrating film.
In addition to the auditorium and the museum, there will also creative space for making films, art and literature, according to material available at the Grand Heritage Hotel Group’s website.
“The Stanley Film Center will cater to a wide audience, including thousands of genre IM fans, industry leaders, aspiring artists and students from around the world,” the web page says. “The Stanley Film Center will also cater to a broad demographic offering family friendly activities and exhibits through the afternoon and late-night blood and gore for older and more mature audiences that runs late into the night.”
The museum space, according to planning documents on a 2019 page hosted by MOA Architecture, says the museum will be a 13,000-square-foot space full of cinema artifacts and rare films from around the world.
It will also include interactive games and experiences.
Blumhouse Productions, which is curating the space, was founded in 2000 and is behind some of the most successful horror movies in the genre, like “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Insidious” and “M3GAN.”
It had been looking for space to display pieces from movie sets for more than six years at the time Cullen was dreaming up the Stanley Hotel film center. The Stanley, with its “The Shining” roots, was a natural fit.
The museum, once complete, is to feature a constantly revolving array of pieces from the latest Blumhouse movies.
Once realized, The Stanley Film Center will be the biggest addition to the iconic property since its was opened by F.O. Stanley in 1909.
Cullen has estimated more than 180,000 will visit the film center, a huge influx of tourism for the Estes Park area.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
