Steven Spielberg will adapt to series the epic film that Stanley Kubrick could not shoot about ‘Napoleon’

Steven Spielberg has announced his next project after ‘The Fabelmans’ at the Berlin Festival, and it couldn’t be more epic and ambitious. Spielberg to Produce Series Based on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’ Scriptone of the films that were never made by the director of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’.

Spielberg has revealed that he is preparing “a big blockbuster” together with HBO to adapt Stanley Kubrick’s script into 7 chaptersproducing the series alongside Christiane Kubrick and Han Harlan (widow and brother-in-law of the long-awaited filmmaker, respectively).

‘Napoleon’ was one of many frustrated projects that Stanley Kubrick could not achieve in life. It was meant to be a comprehensive biography of the life of the famous French leader Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, however, the project was too ambitious and expensive for the studios, and another recent Napoleon film, Sergei Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo,” took its place.

‘Napoleon’ would have been a mega-production with about 40,000 extras as soldiers shot between the United Kingdom, Romania and France. At one point, it was speculated that the very Jack Nicholson of ‘The Shining’, he would play the lead role as the French revolutionary alongside audrey hepburnWhat would his wife Josefina do? With the film scrapped, Kubrick is believed to have used much of his research to historically cement ‘Barry Lyndon’ in 1975.

Spielberg announced his intentions to adapt the Napoleon script for the first time back in 2013., with HBO joining the project in 2016. Little else had we heard since then, and even now we remain in the dark as to whether HBO has officially ordered the pilot or given the final green light to the proposal. Initially, Cary Joji Fukunaga (‘True Detective’, ‘No time to die’) was going to be in charge of directing the series.

Napoleon will not be the first time that Spielberg “culminates” an unfinished project by Kubrick (‘AI Artificial Intelligence’, 2001) nor will it be the only adaptation of Napoleon’s life underway. Ridley Scott will premiere this same 2023 his own version on the relationship between the military man and Josefina, with a joaquin phoenix as spectacular as Napoleon that has caused the rewriting of the script.