The unrealised Stanley Kubrick project still stuck in development hell: “The best thing I’ve ever done”
Stanley Kubrick has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, and yet, there is still a project of his that is languishing in purgatory, neither alive nor completely buried. Throughout his nearly five-decade career, Kubrick made some of the most innovative and visually arresting movies in cinema history. 2001: A Space Odyssey remains just as striking and timeless as it was upon its release in 1968. However, it should not overshadow movies like Barry Lyndon, a project that required lighting so specific that Kubrick had to turn to NASA to create a camera capable of capturing his vision.
Considering his enormous and enduring influence on the medium, Kubrick made surprisingly few movies. From his debut in 1952 with Fear and Desire to his finale in 1999 with Eyes Wide Shut, the auteur released only 13 features, a number dwarfed by every other director of a similar stature. There are multiple reasons for this dearth of output, including the director’s notoriously exacting way of working. One of the main ones, however, is that there were many projects he simply couldn’t get off the ground for one reason or another.
Aside from Terry Gilliam, few directors have had so many unrealised films. Kubrick’s included a science fiction movie called Shadow on the Sun, a Holocaust drama called Aryan Papers, which he stopped working on after Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List, and an epic about Napoleon, which, ironically, Spielberg eventually took over.
One of Kubrick’s oldest projects that has yet to be made or killed is a Civil War drama called The Downslope. Described as being “a sweeping, historical action-drama” (via Deadline), it began life way back in the 1950s, sometime before 1957’s Paths of Glory. The story was conceived as an anti-war narrative centred on the series of battles between Union General George Armstrong Custer and Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby in the Shenandoah Valley.
Before his death, Kubrick carried out his usual meticulous research for the film, which he had originally developed with the help of renowned Civil War historian Shelby Foote. It never made it off the ground, but that didn’t stop other filmmakers from knocking the idea around. In 2015, it was announced that Kubrick’s project would be brought to the screen as a trilogy, with the first film directed by Finding Neverland and World War Z’s Marc Forster.
Six years later, however, the deal was off, and another flurry of Downslope news was making the rounds, this time with decidedly more star power behind it. Frank Darabont, the director and screenwriter of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, was teaming up with Ridley Scott to make a film version of Kubrick’s initial idea. In a 2021 interview, Darabont said that the script he wrote was “the best thing I’ve ever done” (via Film Stories).
This was a big claim for someone who wrote and directed one of the most beloved films of all time, and the pairing of Darabont and renowned battle sequence creator Scott would surely have produced stunning results. Sadly, however, Darabont revealed that no one wanted to produce it. He blamed the over-saturation of the media market, though it’s hard to believe that that could have been the only reason that a film with stellar credentials would fail to make it past the first round of funding. Four years later, Kubrick’s project and Darabont’s supposedly flawless script remain in development hell.
