Ridley Scott’s extended cut of ‘Napoleon’ is over four hours long
Director Ridley Scott has shared that the extended cut of his upcoming historical drama Napoleon has a runtime of over four-and-a-half hours. The film’s current runtime is 158 minutes.
Napoleon stars Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, Napoleon Bonaparte, as he navigates power and love alongside Empress Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby. The film will be released in cinemas this November across the United Kingdom and the United States before showing worldwide on Apple TV+.
Scott hopes that his lengthy extended cut will also receive a release one day. In an interview with Empire, Scott revealed that the version “features more of Joséphine’s life before she meets Napoleon. He’d love Apple (who funded the film) to eventually screen it. But what they have now is hardly slight. ‘It’s an astonishing story’, Phoenix says of Napoleon’s life. ‘Hopefully we captured some of the most interesting moments.'”
Kirby also spoke about the intensity of her co-star’s performance, sharing, “Joaquin studies the psyche, and the psyche of Napoleon is so strange. The film feels like that. It’s kind of peculiar, and there’s an intensity in that.”
She continued: “Napoleon wasn’t stoic and wonderful like Russell Crowe was in Gladiator. He was a director, a war criminal, really. It couldn’t be rousing, because that man killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men, in my opinion needlessly. And for what? To get an empire, for what? In the end, it all disintegrated anyway. That psyche run wild is dangerous as hell, and very strange. And this is a portrait of that.”
Phoenix is no stranger to a character with a strange psyche. The actor has previously taken on the role of the Joker in Todd Phillips’ adaption of the character and, most recently, the anxious title character in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.
Watch the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, out on Wednesday, November 22nd, below.
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