Steven Spielberg has dropped the bombshell by revealing that he has been involved for at least ten years, mounting a major production about one of Stanley Kubrick’s lost projects, a full-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, which will become a seven-part series for the HBO premium cable network.
The great unfulfilled dream of Stanley Kubrick
The project is still in the development stages, but is nearing an official order to be made into a series. Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, the director of ‘The Fabelmans’ said:
“With the cooperation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we are putting together a major production for HBO based on Stanley’s original screenplay, Napoleon. We’re working on it as a seven-part limited series.”
Steven Spielberg told #Berlinale2023 that he’s adapting Stanley Kubrick’s lost film ‘Napoleon’ into a limited series for HBO pic.twitter.com/PBqHzPQNkt
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) February 21, 2023
Kubrick had planned to make the film after the success of ‘2001’ huhHe did extensive research on the French revolutionary leader. He had planned to shoot the movie all over Europe., in France, the United Kingdom and Romania with around 40,000 soldiers. At different stages, David Hemmings and Jack Nicholson were to play the leader, who reigned from 1804 to 1814, with Audrey Hepburn as his wife Josephine his. However, as a result of the cost of releasing the adaptation of Sergei Bondarchuk’s ‘War and Peace’ and the commercial failure of ‘Waterloo’, the film was abandoned and much of Kubrick’s work went into his 1975 film ‘Barry Lyndon’.
Spielberg has been involved since at least 2013 with the intention of turning it into a miniseries. ‘True Detective’s’ Cary Joji Fukunaga was appointed director in 2016 with David Auburn, the Verve and Code Entertainment-represented playwright behind Proof, writing, but following allegations of misconduct by the former, the project’s director remains unclear. It won’t be the first time Spielberg has taken the reins on a project that Kubrick originally developed.
The film ‘AI artificial intelligence’ began when Kubrick acquired the rights to the short story ‘Super toys last all summer‘ by Brian Aldiss. He worked on a treatment for more than 20 years before turning it over to Spielberg in 1995. The latter eventually directed the film, which was released in 2001. Spielberg dedicated the project to Kubrick. This announcement comes as the high-profile ‘Napoleon’ biopic Ridley Scott starring Joaquin Phoenix for Apple TV+ is already underway.