10 Movie Sequels That Took 30 Years To Make

9. Doctor Sleep

Time Between: 39 years, 5 months

Stanley Kubrick's inimitable horror masterpiece The Shining is a sacred enough project that most filmmakers wouldn't even dream of trying to make a sequel to it, no matter that Stephen King had already done the hard graft by writing the novel, Doctor Sleep, back in 2013.

Enter rising horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Hush, The Haunting of Hill House), who finally came aboard to helm the almost four-decades-later follow-up, picking up with a middle-aged Danny Torrance, now played by Ewan McGregor.

Given Flanagan's esteem in the genre, it was easy to be optimistic about him serving up a fitting sequel to Kubrick's masterwork, even if few were expecting a film on-par with or better than its predecessor.

Was It Worth The Wait?

Absolutely. Flanagan quite sensibly doesn't just try to remake The Shining all over again or over-indulge in pandering nostalgia-bait.

Though the film's third act certainly serves up plenty of entertaining fan service, for the most part Doctor Sleep is a fascinating and unexpectedly affecting character study, enlivened by the central performances of McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson in particular.

While it's unlikely to be remembered as an all-timer of the genre as Kubrick's film is, it's nevertheless a rarest of belated sequels that doesn't lose sight of precisely what made the original such a hit, while also bringing plenty of its own ideas to the fore.