Stanley Kubrick’s daughter is addressing a popular conspiracy theory about her late father’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. For decades, theories have been circulating about the 1999 erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, which was finished just days before the legendary filmmaker died of a heart attack at age 70. The long-circulating rumors claim that Kubrick’s original cut of the 159-minute movie contained an additional 20 minutes of footage with a much darker ending that was said to have exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.
Although the movie’s editor, Nigel Galt, insisted that the final edit was Kubrick’s finished product, speculation grew even more rampant after the film’s screenwriter, Roger Avery, said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024 that he had heard secondhand reports about the alleged missing footage. Now, the director’s youngest daughter, Vivian Kubrick — who collaborated with him on several films on and off screen — has set the record straight on the rumors in a lengthy statement on social media. She then explained that her father (famously known for being a perfectionist) had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished so that it could not be re-edited or made into an alternate version.
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But I did not hear that any shots or scenes were removed,” she added. Eyes Wide Shut was considered a controversial movie due to its graphic sexual content, as well as its disturbing depiction of an elite secret sex cult, which theorists later speculated was a prediction or an acknowledgment of Epstein’s crimes. As Vivian mentioned, the film was famously altered digitally to censor its nudity scenes so that Warner Brothers could escape an NC-17 rating.
She went on to say that the film was edited on a program called Avid, but that a digital archive was not used at the time because it was still “the era of physical film distribution.” Because of that, she said, there is no surviving video or digital copy, unused negative or other physical record of the missing footage. That is as far as I can honestly go,” she said. Once the fog of agony had lifted, I involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously,” she concluded.
Vivian went on to tag people who have spread the rumors, including Rogan and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in the post. The Independent has reached out to Warner Brothers for comment. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
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