For a few days in 1980, audiences who bought a ticket to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining saw an ending that no one has been able to watch since. After Jack Torrance froze to death in the Overlook’s hedge maze, the film continued into a hospital, where Wendy and Danny appear alive and recovering, and hotel manager Stuart Ullman arrives to check on them after the ordeal.
In the scene, Ullman tells Wendy that a police search had turned up no evidence of anything supernatural at the hotel and no sign of Jack’s body. He suggests that stress had caused her to imagine what happened, then invites her and Danny to recover at his home in Los Angeles.
Before leaving, Ullman approaches Danny, who is with a nurse, and tosses him the yellow tennis ball from the Overlook. The gesture implied that the events of the film had been real and that Ullman, acting on the hotel’s behalf, was covering them up.
Kubrick pulled the roughly two-minute epilogue within days of the film’s theatrical release and had the prints destroyed. Co-writer Diane Johnson later said Kubrick had initially believed audiences needed confirmation that Wendy and Danny were safe, but test screenings convinced him the hospital sequence weakened the mystery.
As a result, the film now ends on the 1921 photograph hanging inside the Overlook. The deleted footage is considered lost, surviving only in its shooting script, a handful of continuity Polaroids, and the accounts of those who saw it.
