Nothing shuts down a conspiracy theory quite like a direct response from someone close to the source—and this time, it's the director's own daughter.
For years, a persistent rumor has circulated about Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film "Eyes Wide Shut": that the original cut ran 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release, with darker content allegedly tied to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Epstein was convicted in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution, then indicted again in 2019 on sex trafficking charges before dying by suicide in custody that August. The film stars Tom Cruise as a New York doctor who, after learning his wife (played by Nicole Kidman) once fantasized about an affair, embarks on a nocturnal odyssey that draws him into a secretive orgiastic society. The final cut was delivered on March 1, 1999, and Kubrick died just six days later. The film premiered that summer and went on to become the highest-grossing movie of his career.
According to The Independent, accounts don't line up: editor Nigel Galt has maintained that the theatrical version was the final cut, while screenwriter Roger Avery said on "The Joe Rogan Podcast" in 2024 that he'd heard rumors of deleted footage.
Composer Vivian Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's daughter, who worked on several of his films including "Eyes Wide Shut," posted a lengthy statement on X directly addressing the long-running rumor. "This is a story that's circulated for years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don't know," she wrote, noting that her father always burned all the raw footage once a film was completed, specifically to prevent studios from re-cutting or creating alternate versions down the line.
She said that during filming, she had no knowledge of any so-called "missing 20 minutes," and over the years she's never seen any evidence to convince her the claim is true. She described the process of "locking" the final cut and questioned whether such footage, even if it existed, could have survived. "But the absence of surviving materials cuts both ways: it doesn't prove the 20 minutes ever existed in the first place," she wrote, concluding: "I never heard about a missing 20 minutes at the time, and I've never since seen or been shown any evidence that such footage exists. I'm not aware of any surviving materials that would confirm this."
She also said she doesn't treat certain people's after-the-fact accounts as evidence. "In my view, these are stories that got embellished after the fact; people often like to exaggerate their role in a story, even when they weren't actually involved at all." Vivian Kubrick closed by writing: "One thing I'm certain of: if 20 minutes had actually been cut, I would have found out sooner or later. After the grief of that time passed, I was deeply committed to protecting my father's work, and I took that responsibility very seriously." The post tagged podcast host Joe Rogan and Alex Jones at the end.
She noted that the University of the Arts London holds the official archive spanning Kubrick's entire career, including production records and other documentation—including materials related to "Eyes Wide Shut"—but as far as she knows, no batch of Avid raw footage has survived.
