Napoleon: Steven Spielberg relaunches abandoned Stanley Kubrick project

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon will be an HBO series starring Steven Spielberg.

Ten years after announcing his desire to bring the abandoned Stanley Kubrick project to life, American director Steven Spielberg confirmed during a press conference at the Berlin International Film Festival or La Berlinale 2023 that Napoleon is indeed in the works:

In collaboration with Christiane Kubrick and Ian Harlan, we are preparing a massive production for the US channel HBO, based on the original script by Stanley Kubrick. Napoleon will be a seven-episode mini-series.

One of Stanley Kubrick’s lost projects, a Napoleon Bonaparte biopic, has been in the works for several years. Steven Spielberg, who was involved, now says he is “putting on a big production”and the project will be a seven-part series for HBO https://t.co/vx2kBpHtlK.

— Deadline in Hollywood (@DEADLINE) February 21, 2023

Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”was supposed to be over three hours long

Stanley Kubrick originally planned the film after the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey and did extensive research on the leader of the French Revolution. He planned to shoot the film across Europe, including France, Britain and Romania, with some 40,000 soldiers involved. At various stages, the head of state, who ruled from 1804 to 1814, was to be played by David Hemmings and Jack Nicholson, and Audrey Hepburn was to play the role of his wife Josephine. However, due to the cost of filming, the release of Sergei Bondarchuk’s adaptation of War and Peace, and the commercial failure of Waterloo, the film was delayed, and most of Kubrick’s work was included in his 1975 Barry Lyndon film.