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The Trailer for Doctor Sleep Returns Audiences to the Overlook Hotel for the First Time Since Ready Player One

The elevator doors at the Overlook open.
Aech could be around any corner! Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. released the final trailer for director Mike Flanagan’s upcoming film Doctor Sleep on Sunday, and audiences are agog at the film’s jaw-dropping central location: a meticulous recreation of the legendary Overlook Hotel from Ready Player One. Watch Ewan McGregor explore the very same hallways where Parzival, Art3mis, Aech, Daito, and Sho once searched for the Jade Key:

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The new trailer is an absolute gift to keen-eyed Ready Player One fans, who are already picking it apart frame-by-frame to see which rooms of the Overlook made it into the new movie. Some of the details aren’t perfect—Aech famously encountered the creepy twins in the elevator lobby, but in Doctor Sleep, they’ve moved to a hallway outside the caretaker’s apartment—but it’s hard to see that iconic carpet pattern back on the big screen without feeling at least a shiver of the same terror audiences felt encountering it for the first time back in 2018.

The Overlook in Doctor Sleep looks pretty run-down compared to its appearance in Ready Player One, almost as if it had been abandoned for the last 39 year, so expect a lot of exposition setting up the extensive renovations that must have happened between the 2019 of Doctor Sleep and the 2045 of Ready Player One. The trailer wisely leaves the biggest question unanswered: There’s a brief shot of McGregor walking down the hallway toward the Gold Room, but no clues as to whether or not Doctor Sleep will actually recreate the famous ballroom full of whirling, dancing Haunted Mansion zombies that Art3mis had to cross to reach the avatar of tech billionaire James Halliday’s unrequited love Kira Underwood and retrieve the Jade Key. We’ll find out on November 8 if Doctor Sleep is a worthy addition to the RPOCU, or just another attempt to cash in on the public’s fondness for Spielberg’s masterpiece—and, just as importantly, their nostalgia for a time when they could go to a movie theater and stand a better-than-average chance of seeing something truly original.

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