During his long career, American film director Stanley Kubrick had worked on a number of projects which never progressed beyond the pre-production stage under his direction. Some of these projects fell into development hell or are officially cancelled.
The Burning Secret and Natural Child In 1956, after the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M.G.M.) studio turned down a request from Kubrick and his producer partner James B. Harris to film Paths of Glory (1957), MGM then invited Kubrick to review the studio's other properties. Harris and Kubrick discovered the Stefan Zweig novel The Burning Secret (1913), in which a young baron attempts to seduce a young Jewish woman by first befriending her twelve-year-old son, who eventually realizes the actual motives of the baron. Kubrick was enthusiastic about the novel and hired novelist Calder Willingham to write a screenplay; however, Hays Code restrictions hindered the realization of the project.Cocks 2004, p. 151.
The script, once thought to be lost, was found in 2018 and is nearly complete, enough that it could be developed by filmmakers. Kubrick had previously expressed interest in adapting the Willingham novel Natural Child (1952), but he was stymied by the Production Code on that occasion, as well.Cocks 2004, p. 149.
Napoleon
After the success of 2001, Kubrick planned a large-scale biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte. He "tried to see every film that was ever made on the subject", including Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) and the Soviet film series War and Peace, neither of which he liked.
Kubrick also conducted research, read books about the French emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay that has since become available both on the Internet and as part of a published comprehensive collection of his research and pre-production work.
With the help of assistants, Kubrick meticulously created a card catalog of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. He scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the film on location in France, in addition to the use of United Kingdom studios. The director was also going to film the battle scenes in Romania and had enlisted the support of the Romanian People's Army; senior army officers had committed 40,000 soldiers and 10,000 cavalrymen to Kubrick's film for the paper costume battle scenes.
In a conversation with the British Film Institute, Kubrick's brother-in-law Jan Harlan stated that the film was set to enter production with David Hemmings as the title figure Napoleon (later, that role was assigned to Jack Nicholson), with Audrey Hepburn as Kubrick's preference for the character Josephine. In notes that Kubrick wrote to his financial backers, preserved in the book The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick expressed uncertainty in regard to the progress of the Napoleon film and the final product; however, he also stated that he expected to create "the best movie ever made".Castle 2009.
Napoleon was eventually canceled due to the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of the 1968 Sergei Bondarchuk epic film version of the Leo Tolstoy novel War and Peace, as well as the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). A significant portion of Kubrick's historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), the storyline of which ends in 1789, about fifteen years before the commencement of the Napoleonic Wars.
In March 2013, Steven Spielberg announced his intention to create, along with Kubrick's family, a television miniseries based on Kubrick's screenplay.
In May 2016, HBO announced that it would produce a miniseries based on Kubrick's screenplay with Cary Joji Fukunaga as director.
In August 2018, French opera singer and actor David Serero adapted the screenplay for the stage, in New York, in which he stars as Napoleon. The play opened on August 23, 2018.
In February 2023, Spielberg reaffirmed that the miniseries at HBO was still in development and was being worked into a "large production" of a seven-part limited series.
That same year, a similar film with the same name would be later be released in 2023, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Joaquin Phoenix.
Aryan Papers In 1976, Kubrick sought out a film idea that concerned the Holocaust and tried to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an original screenplay. Kubrick requested a "dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell." However, Singer declined, explaining to Kubrick, "I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust."Cocks et al. 2006, p. 196.Cocks 2004.
In the early 1990s, Kubrick nearly entered the production stage of a film adaptation of Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his aunt as they are in hiding from the Nazi regime during the Holocaust—the first-draft screenplay, entitled Aryan Papers, was penned by Kubrick himself. Full Metal Jacket co-screenwriter Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman as the aunt; eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt and Joseph Mazzello as the young boy. Kubrick traveled to the Czech city of Brno, as it was envisaged as a possible filming location for the scenes of Warsaw during wartime, and cinematographer Elemér Ragályi was selected by Kubrick to be the director of photography.
Kubrick's work on Aryan Papers eventually ceased in 1995, as the director was influenced by the 1993 release of Spielberg's Holocaust-themed film Schindler's List. According to Kubrick's wife Christiane, an additional factor in Kubrick's decision was the increasingly depressing nature of the subject as experienced by the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate Holocaust film was beyond the capacity of cinema and returned his attention to the A.I. Artificial Intelligence film project.
In 2005, William Monahan was hired to adapt Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures in co-operation with John Wells Productions.
In 2009, Kubrick's brother-in-law Jan Harlan announced his desire to produce the film and hire Ang Lee or Roman Polanski to direct.
In 2020, it was reported that Luca Guadagnino hoped to direct the film, and that he had examined Kubrick's papers on the project, held at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at University of the Arts London.
Shadow on the Sun In the early 1960s, Kubrick, a keen listener of BBC Radio, heard the radio serial drama Shadow on the Sun; written by Gavin Blakeney, Shadow on the Sun is a work of science fiction in which a virus is introduced to Earth through a meteorite landing. At a time when Kubrick was looking for a new project, the director became reacquainted with Shadow on the Sun. Kubrick purchased screen rights from Blakeney in 1988 for £1,500. Thereon, Kubrick read and annotated a script before moving onto A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The tone of the unrealized project, as described by Anthony Frewin in The Kubrick Archives, is a cross between The War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks!.Castle, Alison, ed., pp. 517
Lunatic at Large On November 1, 2006, Kubrick's son-in-law Philip Hobbs announced that he would be shepherding a film treatment of a film-noir thriller called Lunatic at Large. Kubrick had commissioned the project for treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but it had been lost until Hobbs uncovered a manuscript following Kubrick's death. In August 2011, it was confirmed that the project was in development for future release, with the involvement of actors Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell, and U.K. screenwriter Stephen R. Clarke.
In 2020, it was reported that Terry Gilliam was developing the project, according to Gilliam, he was set to start production, but it was cancelled due to the Covid-19 lockdowns.
In February 2021, Variety announced that producers Bruce Hendricks and Galen Walker had optioned the rights to the project.
Unreleased screenplays A number of screenplays that were written by Kubrick, who was either hired on a commission basis or was writing for his own projects, remain unreleased. One such screenplay is The German Lieutenant (co-written with Richard Adams), in which a group of German soldiers embark upon a mission during the final days of World War II. During the time period when The German Lieutenant was planned as Kubrick's next production, the director explained his interest in making another war film:
... one of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallize and come out into the open.
Other examples of unreleased Kubrick screenplays are I Stole 16 Million Dollars, a fictionalized account of early 20th century Baptist minister turned safecracker Herbert Emmerson Wilson (the film was to be produced by Kirk Douglas's company Bryna Productions, despite Douglas's belief that the script was poorly written, and Cary Grant was approached for the lead role); and a first draft of a script about the Mosby Rangers, a Confederate guerrilla force that was active during the American Civil War.Ciment 1982. Online at: Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange: An interview with Michel Ciment
Other projects Marlon Brando contacted Kubrick asking him to direct a film adaptation of Charles Neider's Western novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, featuring Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Brando was impressed, saying that "Stanley is unusually perceptive, and delicately attuned to people. He has an adroit intellect, and is a creative thinker—not a repeater, not a fact-gatherer. He digests what he learns and brings to a new project an original point of view and a reserved passion". The two worked on a script for six months, begun by a then unknown Sam Peckinpah. Many disputes broke out over the project, and in the end, Kubrick distanced himself from what would become One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Kubrick was then reported to have been fired and accepted a parting fee of $100,000, though in a 1960 interview he claimed that he quit because "It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie". Kubrick's biographer LoBrutto states that for contractual reasons, Kubrick was not able to cite the real reason, but issued a statement saying that he had resigned "with deep regret because of my respect and admiration for one of the world's foremost artists".
Kubrick was offered the chance to direct both The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), but declined, despite once saying in 1966 to a friend that he had long desired to "make the world's scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience". Before deciding to direct The Shining, Kubrick even considered making a film based on the 1974 novel The Shadow Knows, whose author Diane Johnson later became the co-writer for The Shining.
Kubrick was fascinated by the career of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, his wife's uncle, and contemplated creating a film of the social circle that surrounded Joseph Goebbels. Although Kubrick worked on this project for several years, the director was unable to progress beyond a rough story outline.