Draft:Napoleon (upcoming miniseries)

Napoleon is an upcoming historical drama television miniseries based on Stanley Kubrick's unproduced biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. The series will be directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, written by David Auburn, and executive produced by Fukanaga Steven Spielberg. It will be released by HBO in the United States.

Stanley Kubrick's film development
Following 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), writer and director Stanley Kubrick originally planned to make a film about the life of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Fascinated by his life and own "self-destruction", Kubrick spent a great deal of time planning the film's development, and had conducted about two years of extensive research into Napoleon's life, reading several hundred books and gaining access to Napoleon's personal memoirs and commentaries. He also tried to see every film ever made about Napoleon and found none of them appealing, including Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) which is generally considered to be a masterpiece, but for Kubrick, he "found it really terrible. Technically [Gance] was ahead of his time and he introduced new film techniques – in fact Eisenstein credited him with stimulating his initial interest in montage – but as far as story and performance goes it's a very crude picture." Pat LoBrutto states that Napoleon was an ideal subject for Kubrick, embracing Kubrick's "passion for control, power, obsession, strategy, and the military", while Napoleon's psychological intensity and depth, logistical genius and war, sex, and the evil nature of man were all ingredients which deeply appealed to Kubrick.

Kubrick drafted a screenplay in 1961, and envisaged making a "grandiose" epic, with up to 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. He had intended hiring the armed forces of an entire country to make the film, as he considered Napoleonic battles to be "so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets", with an "aesthetic brilliance that doesn't require a military mind to appreciate". He wanted them to be replicated as authentically as possible on screen. Kubrick had sent research teams to scout for locations across Europe, and commissioned screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, one of his young assistants on 2001, to the Isle of Elba, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, taking thousands of pictures for his later perusal. Kubrick approached numerous stars to play leading roles, including Audrey Hepburn for Empress Josephine, a part which she could not accept due to semiretirement. Additionally, British actors David Hemmings and Ian Holm were considered for the lead role of Napoleon, before Jack Nicholson was cast.

The film was well into preproduction and ready to begin filming in 1969 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer canceled the project. Numerous reasons have been cited for the abandonment of the project, including its projected cost, a change of ownership at MGM, and the poor reception that the 1970 Soviet film about Napoleon, Waterloo, received. In 2011, Taschen published the book, Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, a large volume compilation of literature and source documents from Kubrick, such as scene photo ideas and copies of letters Kubrick wrote and received.

Television miniseries development
In March 2013, Steven Spielberg, who previously collaborated with Kubrick on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and is a passionate admirer of his work, announced that he would be developing Napoleon as a TV miniseries for HBO based on Kubrick's original screenplay, with Baz Luhrmann in talks to direct.

Since May 2016, it was reported that director Cary Joji Fukunaga, alongside Spielberg, could finalize the long-sought project, after Kubrick's sister Christine and collaborator Jan Harlan granted HBO access to Kubrick's archive, with Spielberg's Amblin Television confirmed to produce with HBO Entertainment and MGM Television. In August 2018, Kubrick's original screenplay of Napoleon was adapted on stage. In September 2018, Fukunaga confirmed the reports, saying that he is already working with HBO. In August 2019, the project was also discussed for a possible miniseries adaptation, with the same crew. In February 2023, Spielberg announced he was still developing the seven-episode miniseries, written by David Auburn, and that it would be different from Ridley Scott's Napoleon film which released later that year.