Stanley Kubrick‘s daughter Vivian is addressing a long-circulating rumor regarding the master filmmaker’s final movie, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Kubrick took to X to give a very detailed response to a conspiracy theory that involves unreleased footage, a different ending, and even Jeffrey Epstein.
First, here’s the rumor, which basically combines a couple different ideas that have been making the rounds for years: Kubrick’s original cut supposedly contained an additional 20 minutes of footage (for a runtime of 179 minutes instead of 159 minutes) and a much darker ending. In this version, the sex cult that ensnares Tom Cruise’s character is revealed to be a child sex ring, and Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s characters sacrifice their daughter to the cult. As the theory goes, Warner Bros. objected to this ending, and re-cut the film after Kubrick died suddenly (and, in some tellings of the tale, suspiciously). The idea was that Kubrick either knew about Epstein’s crimes, or knew about a similar group. The theory was boosted by a 2024 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast where screenwriter Roger Avary said he heard such reports secondhand.
Previously, the film’s editor, Nigel Galt, said Kubrick’s final edit is essentially the same movie that was released. Now Vivian Kubrick, who collaborated with her father on several films, has weighed in (and tagged Rogan, Alex Jones and included a slew of Epstein-related hashtags for good measure).
You can read the full version here, which goes into greater detail about the technical aspects of film editing, or below is an abbreviated version:
“You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut,” Vivian began. “It’s a story that has been circulating for many years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don’t know. There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died. This will be very disappointing to many people, but I certainly did not hear anything about a missing 20 minutes at the time, nor have I heard anything since that would confirm such a section ever existed. I guess you could stop reading right here.”
“The only alteration I heard about at the time was the use of CGI — computer-generated figures — to obscure some of the nudity in the orgy scene, which Warner Brothers wanted in order to secure an R rating for the film,” she continued. “But I did not hear that any shots or scenes were removed. When my father died, Eyes Wide Shut had reached picture lock and was moving through the final stages of post-production. It had just been shown to the studio heads, I assume with a temporary music track, while the final sound mix and some of the music work were still to be completed … Once the picture was locked, the original camera negative would have been physically cut to match the final Avid edit. Once the negative itself had been cut, you couldn’t simply undo those cuts and rearrange the film: each cut destroyed a frame at both the head and tail of the shot … The original negative of the outtakes never went through that process because, of course, those shots were not part of the finished film … to my knowledge, there is no surviving cache of Avid rushes from the film.”
“I never heard of a missing 20 minutes at the time, I have never subsequently seen or been shown any evidence that such a section existed, and I know of no surviving material that establishes that it did,” Vivian concluded. “I cannot tell you what may or may not have happened during the 30-some hours immediately after my father’s death; I was not there. But unless substantive evidence emerges — and I do not regard stories from certain people who, in my opinion, are inventing them after the fact as evidence; people often want to sensationalize their part in a story, if indeed they even had a part — the story that 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after his death remains, to my mind, an actual conspiracy theory, not an established fact. Finally, this much I’m certain of: if indeed 20 minutes had been removed, I definitely would have found out about it eventually. Once the fog of agony had lifted, I involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously.”
Kubrick has also been at the center of other wild conspiracy theories, including the claim that he helped stage the Apollo 11 moon landing and then dropped hints about his involvement in his 1980 classic The Shining.
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