Nearly 40 years after his cinematic debut, Danny Torrance is returning to the big screen. As IndieWire reports, director Mike Flanagan has wrapped production on Doctor Sleep, a movie based on the Stephen King's follow-up to The Shining.
Doctor Sleep picks up with a grown-up Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, decades after the events at the Overlook Hotel transpired. Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Bruce Greenwood, Zahn McClarnon, Jacob Tremblay, and Emily Alyn Lind make up the rest of the primary cast.
Doctor Sleep won't be a direct sequel to the 1980 horror classic. Rather, it will be an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel to his original novel, which is notably different from the Stanley Kubrick version. King described the first adaptation as a "Cadillac with no engine," and was so dissatisfied with the film that he even made The Shining into a separate made-for-TV-movie in 1997.
Viewers will have to wait until January 2020 to see if Flanagan's movie does better service to King's source material. In the meantime, the filmmaker praised the author and his book in a Facebook post, writing, "I read the novel as soon as it came out back in 2013, fascinated and moved by the epic story of Dan Torrance and Abra Stone, but I never imagined for a moment that I’d be the person to bring it to the big screen. It’s been an honor to spend the last five months with this fantastic cast and crew, and to be trusted with Stephen King’s extraordinary story."
Flanagan is no stranger to adapting beloved horror books for the screen; he gained attention this past October for his Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House.