The Best Movies Never Made

After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick set his sights on a Napoleon Bonaparte biopic. Kubrick conducted extensive research on Napoleon and even went as far as to scout locations before the production was eventually cancelled due to budget constraints. Kubrick’s film – an ambitious, large-scale epic that he predicted would be “the best movie ever made” – was set to star Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier and Alec Guiness, as well as over 50,000 extras. Plans to revive the project – first with Steven Spielberg and then with Cary Joji Fukunaga – have all fallen through.