The Shining ends with Wendy and Danny escaping, leaving Jack behind, frozen in the snow. Back inside the Overlook Hotel, the camera slowly zooms in on a framed photograph that shows Jack at the New Year's Eve Ball in 1921. However, at one point, a slightly different ending was in the works.

Frequent Pixar director Lee Unkrich runs a fan site dedicated to The Shining, and posted some cut pages of script that detail an alternate ending. In this extra scene, Wendy wakes up in a hospital, and is told by Jack's boss, Stuart Ullman, that no evidence of the creepy things she reported was found at the Overlook. Stuart then gives Danny a ball similar to the one Jack plays with earlier in the movie.

One week after The Shining opened in theaters, Stanley Kubrick had a change of heart about the two-minute coda. He ordered the scene to be cut from all prints in release and destroyed, so that it could never be reinstated.