Published in 2013, Doctor Sleep is Stephen King's sequel to his 1977 novel The Shining. Released in 2019, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is an adaptation of the novel, and also a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film of The Shining, which famously deviated from the text. Amazingly, it juggles those two aspects very successfully, stretching into and easily filling its 150-minute run time. And now it's about to get even longer, with Flanagan confirming a three-hour director's cut for the film's imminent Blu-ray and digital release. It is, he says, a more "literary" version than the theatrical cut.
“There is new material throughout the whole film," he explained to Collider. "Some of it is brand new stuff that was never included in the theatrical cut, and there’s also a handful of extended (or altered) scenes as well. There are some big new scenes, for sure... including in the final act at the Overlook. Some of my favourite stuff involved Young Danny and Wendy (there’s some terrific material with Alex Essoe that I’m thrilled is restored here), and will be familiar to fans of the book. There’s also a fair amount of new stuff involving young Abra in the film’s first act, learning about her shine, and how it affects her parents."
Flanagan says that "there was never any intention to release this cut theatrically, we always knew it was too long. But we worked on it alongside the theatrical cut throughout post, and it made it a lot easier to make hard decisions in the edit, knowing that some day this cut might see the light of day.”
If you've yet to catch Doctor Sleep in any form, the story finds 1980 Overlook Hotel survivor Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) in New Hampshire, working in a hospice, where his psychic "Shining" ability helps ease terminally ill patients in their final moments. When Rebecca Ferguson's child-murdering Shining cult The True Knot target the young and particularly powerful Abra (Kyliegh Curran), Dan is drawn into protecting her, and a journey that leads inexorably back to that haunted and abandoned hotel.
The new version of Doctor Sleep arrives on Blu-ray in February.