Just when your butt has regained feeling after sitting through ‘It: Chapter Two’, here comes another Stephen King cinematic adaptation to numb it all over again. Opening next month, ‘Doctor Sleep’ runs a bladder-busting two hours and 32 minutes. In comparison, ‘It: Chapter Two’ was two hours and 45 minutes long, so if you endured that, you’ve got this made. This looks to be just the latest in the trend of longer-than-average films. ‘Avengers: Endgame’ was three hours and one minute long. But these pictures have nothing on Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’, which clocks in at three hours and 29 minutes, but even though that is getting a cursory theatrical release in order to qualify for awards, most folks will be watching that on Netflix, so they can break it up however they see fit.
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To view it another way, ‘Doctor Sleep’ is the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’. That 1980 movie is two hours and 26 minutes long, so the sequel is just six minutes longer than that.
In the case of ‘It’, the extra time was, for the most part, used to more fully adapt King’s massive novel. The original TV miniseries condensed the whole tome down to three hours and 12 minutes. For the time period (1990), the abridged adaptation worked fine, but readers of the novel were glad that the new movies were longer, allowing for deeper development and a few additional elements from the book.
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In the case of ‘Doctor Sleep’, which has never before been adapted, the long run time allows for a faithful translation, but it also allowed director Mike Flanagan to incorporate elements to tie this picture to the film version of ‘The Shining’. It’s true that King doesn’t like that film, but it’s been seen by millions and is much more a part of the public consciousness than the book. For one thing, ‘Doctor Sleep’ returns to the Overlook Hotel, something that doesn’t transpire in the book. It is also known that Flanagan’s depiction of the True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), will be different than in the book. That may also account for some of the movie’s chronal real estate.
Does the long run time make you more or less likely to check this picture out in theaters?
‘Doctor Sleep’, starring Ferguson, Ewan McGregor, Selena Anduze, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, Jocelin Donahue, Alex Essoe, Bruce Greenwood, Emily Alyn Lind, Carl Lumbly, Zahn McClarnon, Carel Struycken, Chelsea Talmadge, and Jacob Tremblay opens on November 2, 2019.
Source: Cinema Blend
