The Stanley Hotel, the famous historic site that inspired Stephen King’s book “The Shining” that was later adapted into a horror film classic starring Jack Nicholson, is busy with construction.

It’s been more than a year since a state bond issuer bought the hotel in Estes Park for $400 million in an effort to make it a larger tourism site for the state and generate more tax revenues. The sale also included funding to expand the hotel’s buildings to add 65 rooms and develop a nearly 70,000-square-foot event space and horror film museum.

The new film center will be curated by Blumhouse Productions — the studio behind major horror films such as “Obsession,” “M3GAN,” “The Purge,” “Insidious” and more.

The project was originally scheduled to finish in late 2028 but its new owners are now projecting the construction to be finished months ahead of schedule.

“We are about three and a half months ahead of schedule,” John Cullen, CEO and chairman of the SPACE board, told state economic officials on Thursday. “One, because of good management and two, because we probably overscheduled out of safety on the deal.”

Now, at nearly the halfway point, they’re eyeing an opening in early 2028.

The Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education LLC, or SPACE for short, is a subsidiary organization of The Colorado Education and Cultural Facilities Authority (CECFA) and the new owner of the Stanley Hotel.

The $60 million expansion project broke ground in September 2025.

It received $46 million from the Colorado State Regional Tourism Act and a $1 million grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. The owners detailed the state of the project on Thursday during a monthly meeting of the Colorado Economic Development Commission, which approved the awards.

“Thanks to our extraordinarily warm winters for construction, we are really in a great place,” said Cullen, who also was the previous owner of the hotel before the sale. “We’re swinging a piece of steel in place every 28 minutes.”

Still, the construction is disruptive, said Mark Heller, executive director of CECFA.

“We are at peak construction destruction right now, unfortunately overlapping with the peak tourism season,” Heller said. “But we’re gonna get through it.”

The building’s exterior shells are expected to be finished by Christmas and disruption should be minimized by then, he added.

The disruption has caused some other hiccups. Big artists have already been booked for the grand opening, but now the celebrations may move up.

The construction noise also made it really difficult for the Sundance Director’s Lab this year, the event that hosts indie filmmakers to work on projects at the hotel in June.

The event has been in Estes Park since 2024 and was one of the drivers behind helping Colorado secure the Sundance Film Festival.

“Last year, you could do quiet on the set. This year was a dance with Saunders Construction interrupting,” Cullen said. “We had to stop dynamite blasting, steel laying, concrete … We took three weather days out of our schedule to shut things down to assist them in being quiet.”

But next year, it looks like the Sundance Institute will take its director’s and screenwriting lab back to the Sundance Resort in Utah, where it was originally held, he said.

The lab originally moved to the Stanley Hotel due to construction at the Utah resort. Sundance declined to comment for this story.

But it’s not too much of a loss for the hotel as it makes more money from concerts and its regular customers, Cullen said. And at least, Boulder now has the film festival.

“If they ever want to come back, we’ll make room for them, but I will tell you that it’s going to get tougher to get quiet on the set at the Stanley Hotel,” Cullen said. “The Blumhouse Museum itself is set to have 350,000 people a year.”