“Doctor Sleep” isn’t your typical Stephen King adaptation. While the film is adapted from the novel of the same name from the acclaimed horror writer, “Doctor Sleep” is attempting to serve two separate masters. First, the film is hoping to make fans of the novel happy by staying faithful to the source material. Secondly, and more controversially, the film is also trying to act as a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” which also is based on a King novel, but took the story in a very different direction. And to do these things, “Doctor Sleep” is going to need a king-sized run-time.
AMC has confirmed the official run-time of “Doctor Sleep” is currently 152 minutes, or just a hair over two-and-a-half-hours. That makes the film only the second Stephen King adaptation to clock in at the over-150-minute threshold, joining this year’s “It: Chapter Two.” In fact, the film currently beats out the epic Kubrick film by a whopping six minutes. This news was confirmed on social media by director Mike Flanagan, who retweeted the run-time and added a brief warning.
The filmmaker tweeted, “Yeah, you may want to go with the SMALL soda…”
In the modern era of filmmaking, a film running over 150 minutes is far from shocking. Hell, this year alone, we have two major blockbusters clocking in at over three hours (“Avengers: Endgame” and “The Irishman”), so two-and-a-half-hours is a breeze. However, when you consider that horror films generally run well under two-hours, this makes for something relatively unheard of.
Obviously, when you are already going to be hit with comparisons to “The Shining,” it doesn’t do “Doctor Sleep” any favors to have a length that is above what it took for Kubrick to create one of the best horror films of all time. Obviously, if “Doctor Sleep” suffers from any issues regarding pacing, the axes are going to come out, as critics and fans will massacre the film for being 152 minutes. This is an issue that affected the aforementioned “It: Chapter Two,” which largely was criticized for a bloated length.
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We still have about a month left before we can judge for ourselves, as “Doctor Sleep” doesn’t arrive in theaters until November 8.
Yeah, you may want to go with the SMALL soda… https://t.co/16ZYaehmbA
— Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) October 14, 2019