Longtime gestating, it looks like a sequel to The Shining is finally coming.
Warner Bros. had been developing an on-screen adaptation to Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep and sequel to The Shining for years now. Variety reports that the studios have finally decided to fast-track the project into pre-production.
Set to star as all grown up Danny Torrance is Ewan McGregor, a casting that King himself has given a blessing to.
Doctor Sleep picks up with Torrance in middle age, still haunted by the trauma of the Overlook Hotel. A spitting image of his father, a man who suffers from rage and a drinking problem, he works as a hospice nurse. Once he embraces sobriety, he uses his “shining” powers to ease the transition for dying patients at the hospice when he discovers that there is a way for his powers to grow.
Mike Flanagan is directing and Trevor Macy is producing along with Vertigo Entertainment’s Jon Berg.
Whether Doctor Sleep will be a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining or the novel itself is not yet known. King himself told EW: “One of the things — and I’m not sure if this is going to be a problem for readers or not — is that Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the novel. It’s not a sequel to the Kubrick film. At the end of the Kubrick film, the Overlook is still there. It just kind of freezes. But at the end of the book, it burns down.”
The original adaptation of The Shinning starred Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd as young Danny Torrance.
You can see McGregor next in Disney’s new live-action Winnie the Pooh adaptation, Christopher Robin.
