If you’ve got an unfinished version of a new movie kicking around, there are few people you’d rather have finishing it than Steven Spielberg. After all, he’s made some of the best movies of all time.
The man himself is currently on the awards season trail promoting the most recent Steven Spielberg movie, as the director’s autobiographical The Fabelmans has picked up seven Oscars nominations – including a Best Director nod for Spielberg.
When you’re a director with so much on your plate, you’d be forgiven for taking step back. However, Spielberg isn’t just any man and he’s now forging forward with a project to finish a Stanley Kubrick movie the director never got to complete.
Of course, Spielberg has form in this arena, having stepped forward to bring Kubrick’s planned science fiction movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence to screens in 2001.
He is now turning his attention to Kubrick’s notoriously ambitious Napoleon movie. Kubrick wrote a script for the historical epic based on huge amounts of research way back in the 1960s, only for the war movie to be consigned to development hell prior to his death in 1999.
Now, speaking to Empire at the Berlin Film Festival, Spielberg said: “With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley’s original script Napoleon. We are working on Napoleon as a seven-part limited series.”
So it seems that Napoleon was deemed too ambitious for a movie and will instead become a TV series. Given the fact Spielberg’s small screen history includes the likes of Band of Brothers, it’s clear he’s just as capable of working magic away from the cinema.
But he’s not the only French history project in town, with Ridley Scott hard at work on his own Napoleon movie, in which Joaquin Phoenix will play the famous military leader.
That’s just one of the many big movies coming to screens this year, and we’ve got you covered on all of the others. For more from history, find out about the Oppenheimer release date and take a look at the Joker 2 release date for information on what Phoenix is doing next.