Napoleon
Stanley Kubrick's unmade film
Kubrick catalogued a life day by day and planned battles by the thousand, but the epic remained an archive instead of a film.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- detailed preproduction
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
Stanley Kubrick's planned historical feature about Napoleon Bonaparte, developed after 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick completed a screenplay, assembled a vast card index of Napoleon's movements, surveyed locations and negotiated access to large numbers of troops for battle scenes. The project reached unusually detailed pre-production without principal photography.
Existence timeline
Kubrick begins intensive biographical and logistical work.
A dated final draft and extensive production plans are assembled.
The studio retreats amid budget concerns and a weak market for historical epics.
Kubrick releases Barry Lyndon using techniques developed for period filmmaking.
Casting ideas, locations, battle logistics and a day-by-day research index are developed in detail.
Why it ended
MGM withdrew as costs and market conditions worsened after expensive historical epics underperformed. Kubrick moved to A Clockwork Orange and later reused parts of his period research discipline in Barry Lyndon.
Last confirmed trace
The Stanley Kubrick Archive holds research, correspondence, location material and screenplay drafts; Taschen reproduced a large selection as The Greatest Movie Never Made.
What it left behind
Napoleon became the archetype of a director's impossible passion project and remains a major scholarly window into Kubrick's research method.
How we classified it
No generally obtainable public release existed; demonstrations, internal prototypes or archival fragments do not constitute public access to the proposed work.
The strongest verified milestone maps to detailed_preproduction in Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.