Dying to see Midsommar¨

The 4K remastering is of Kubrick’s original 146 minute version of the film which premiered in the United States on May 23rd, 1980.

Three days after the release of the film, Stanley Kubrick and Warner Bros. ordered all projectionists to cut about 2 minutes from the end of the film, and send the footage back to the studio. Starting after the closeup of frozen Jack, the camera goes to a pullback shot with part of a state trooper's car and the legs of troopers walking around in the foreground. We then cut to the hotel manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) walking down a hospital hallway to the nurse's station to inquire about Danny and Wendy. He's told they're both doing well and proceeds to Wendy's room. After some gentle conversation, he tells Wendy that searchers have been unable to locate any evidence of the apparitions she saw. Additionally, Jack's body cannot be located. We then cut to the camera silently roaming the halls of the Overlook Hotel for about a minute until it comes up to the wall with the photographs, where it [back to the ending as it is now known] fades in on the photo of Jack in the 1921 picture.

Unless you saw the premiere in 1980, you’ve never seen it. Kubrick didn’t let that shit out.

Yeah, that’s gonna be a contentious issue, I imagine. Still possible it’s just a mangled press release at this point, though.

The restoration is premiering at Cannes tomorrow and it’s reported to have the lost ending restored. Can’t believe this is happening.

This is super interesting. I'm so torn on whether or not I want this to be included in the film.

I get that, but I’m just so excited to see it that I don’t care.

Also, if there’s any film for which Kubrick’s infamous perfectionism wasn’t as rigid as usual, it’s this one. I mean, there have been two very different cuts circulating in different territories for decades and Kubrick approved both of them. And technically he did approve this ending as well and showed it to the public, even if he did rescind it afterward.

The second outtake was a two-minute hospital scene that was placed after Jack froze to death and before the final shot of the ballroom photograph. In the scene (read the script pages), the hotel manager, Ullman (Barry Nelson), visits Wendy and Danny after their ordeal and explains that no supernatural evidence was found to support their claims of what transpired. Just when the audience begins to question everything they’ve seen, Ullman ominously gives Danny the same ball that was rolled to him from an unseen force outside Room 237.
Johnson: In other words: All of this really happened, and the magic events were actual. It was just a little twist. It was easy to jettison.
The hospital scene was included in the film’s preview screening for critics in New York and Los Angeles. Johnson has previously said Kubrick liked the scene because it reassured the audience that Wendy and Danny were okay. But Ullman giving Danny the ball ramped up audience confusion. So in a unusual move, Kubrick ordered it removed from prints distributed around the country.

Harlan: The tennis ball is the same thing as the photograph — it’s unexplainable. It makes Ullman now another ghost element. Was he the ghost from the very beginning? The film is complex enough because nothing is explained. That non-explaining is what was bad for the film initially. It was not a huge success. Now everybody thinks it’s the best horror film ever or whatever. But when it came out the audience expected a horror film with a resolution, with an explanation. Who is the baddie? What was going on? And they were disappointed — many of them, anyway. The fact they were left puzzled was exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted. And when the film [screened for critics] and wasn’t well received, Warners quite rightly suggested, “It’s enough, just take [the hospital scene] out.” So Stanley did it. He’s not stubborn, especially since this is a film mainly to entertain people. But Stanley was actually very sad that he misread the audience, that he trusted the audience to live with puzzles and no answers, and that they didn’t like it.