Spielberg has just announced arguably the biggest project of his career
We can only imagine how much this might cost to make...
Steven Spielberg's last two movies, West Side Story and The Fabelmans, are considered some of his very best work, with both projects garnering huge Oscar attention... but both winding up as big box office flops. Never a man to allow his creativity to be stifled, he has just announced his next major project, and it could wind up being the biggest project of his entire career to date.
Way back in 1968, director Stanley Kubrick was already planning his next movie once 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in cinemas; an epic retelling of the story of Napoleon. The French Revolutionary leader was reportedly to be played by Jack Nicholson, while Audrey Hepburn was to play his wife Josephine. There were to be scenes involving 40,000 soldiers (remember, no CGI!) for sequences filmed across France, UK and Romania.
However, following the massive financial flop Waterloo (another period war epic) in 1970, Kubrick went on to make A Clockwork Orange instead. And now, over five decades later, Spielberg is picking up the reins. While accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday night (presented by Bono, no less), Spielberg said the following of his new project: "With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO based on Stanley’s original script Napoleon. We are working on Napoleon 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
Of course, Spielberg is no stranger to making multi-part epics with HBO, having executive produced Band Of Brothers and The Pacific there, although his new WWII show Masters Of The Air will be debuting on Apple TV+ later this year.
Additionally, Spielberg has previously adapted a project that Kubrick had planned on doing before he passed away in 1999; that being 2001's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which remains one of Spielberg's most underappreciated movies.
Meanwhile, there is also another Napoleon project in the works, this one directed by Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix, and due to debut on Apple TV+. Filming on that movie has already begun, and will likely arrive quite a while before Spielberg and HBO's version.
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