Why was Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘Napoleon’ abandoned?
Thanks to his meticulous nature and the way he became entirely consumed by everything he worked on, every Stanley Kubrick undertaking was a passion project in a sense, but cinephiles have been left to rue Napoleon above all others as the one that got away.
There were a number of potential movies Kubrick dabbled with that never went into production, but his sweeping historical epic has taken on a mythology that puts it in a class of its own. On one hand, it robbed cinema of what could have been one of its greatest-ever films. On the other hand, if Napoleon had moved forward, then Barry Lyndon might not have happened.
As part of his exhaustive research, Kubrick amassed 276 books concerning Napoleon Bonaparte and set about trying to condense the life of such an important historical figure into a filmable screenplay. Hot off the back of an instant classic and timeless masterpiece in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the filmmaker was planning to make it his next port of call.
Researchers were deployed all over Europe to supplement Kubrick’s own fact-finding missions, with his brother-in-law and executive producer Jan Harlan “looking for relevant material, books and drawings, simply everything I could find on the period from the French Revolution until the Congress of Vienna in 1815.” The plan was to tell the subject’s entire life story, which would have been grandiose not only in scale, but in cost.
The year after A Space Odyssey was released, Kubrick had a 148-page screenplay drafted with the utmost historical accuracy and authenticity in mind. As Harlan explained to the BBC, “the ideal would have been to leave audiences feeling as if they had watched a current affairs programme.” An admirable approach, but an arduous undertaking that would have also been inordinately expensive.
Kubrick claimed he could have shot the whole thing in roughly six months, one that would put other Napoleonic movies to shame by comparison. In a cruel twist of irony, though, one such project played a significant part in thwarting the filmmaker’s ambition, with Sergei Bondarchuk’s lavish Waterloo bombing at the box office in 1970.
Even though he had a contract in place with MGM, the studio that footed the bill for 2001 wasn’t willing to take a gamble on Napoleon. Harlan revealed that Kubrick “only had a pre-production agreement with MGM” that bound them “to make a plan, a schedule and budget” without having to commit to making the film itself.
When the moneymen discovered Kubrick wanted tens of thousands of extras, thousands of horses, and period-accurate costumes for every single one of them, they were suddenly hit with a case of cold feet.
So, what happened to the Napoleon plans?
Kubrick did end up incorporating some of his research and innovations on how to shoot period pieces into Barry Lyndon, but his abandoned plans for Napoleon never became an itch that he had to scratch by any means necessary. Harlan confirmed that he never seriously considered dusting it off again prior to his death, “because he knew he could not do justice to his vision or his thoroughness unless he had much more screentime and a bigger budget.”
Ridley Scott was roundly criticised for the historical inaccuracies in his Napoleon movie that told virtually the same tale he had in mind all those years ago, but Kubrick’s long-gestating plan may yet come to fruition. Steven Spielberg has previous in steering the iconic auteur’s unfinished projects over the finish line after taking on A.I Artificial Intelligence, and he’s determined to do the same thing again.
It was first announced in 2013 that Spielberg was planning a Napoleon miniseries using Kubrick’s screenplay as the inspiration, with Cary Joji Fukunaga being named as director three years later. It still hasn’t come to pass, but as recently as the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, the Jaws and Jurassic Park architect maintained the plan remains “a large production for HBO based on Stanley’s original script” set to be comprised of seven episodes.
It was too expensive and potentially too unwieldy to get off the ground decades ago, but the paradigm has shifted sufficiently enough for Napoleon to potentially be realised as a massive-scale small screen event.
