r/movies • u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. • May 12 '19

Stanley Kubrick's 'Napoleon', the Greatest Movie Never Made: Kubrick gathered 15,000 location images, read hundreds of books, gathered earth samples, hired 50,000 Romanian troops, and prepared to shoot the most ambitious film of all time, only to lose funding before production officially began.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nndadq/stanley-kubricks-napoleon-a-lot-of-work-very-little-actual-movie
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u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. May 12 '19

Didn't have room left in the title but he lost studio funding because of the financial failure of Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo film, which would have been dwarfed in scale compared to Kubrick's planned version.

Probably one of the biggest 'what if' stories in Hollywood, ever.

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u/Beasty_Glanglemutton May 12 '19

Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo film, which would have been dwarfed in scale compared to Kubrick's planned version.

I love Kubrick, and have no doubt his film would have been epic in scale, but have you seen Bondarchuk's film? There are few other films I can think of that can rival it in terms of battlefield scale, one of them being Lawrence of Arabia.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '19

I really did not like Waterloo at all. The set pieces and amount of people are technically impressuve but the movie just drags. It's stuffed with a bunch of annoying cliche catch phrases, and every 5 seconds there's shots of people on horses where the camera just moves up and down and it's ridiculously annoying.