Stanley Kubrick’s daughter debunked fervent rumors about Eyes Wide Shut, the erotic thriller that would become the director’s last picture.
Vivian Kubrick, 66, has insisted that the movie never contained a mysterious 20 minutes of cut footage. In a lengthy thread on X, she weighed in on the persisting discourse. “You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut,” she wrote.
“There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died. This will be very disappointing to many people, but I certainly did not hear anything about a missing 20 minutes at the time, nor have I heard anything since that would confirm such a section ever existed,” she continued.
Conspiracy theories and speculation surrounding these missing minutes have persisted for years. In 2024, screenwriter Roger Avary, a self-proclaimed “student of Kubrick,” told podcaster Joe Rogan that the movie’s conclusion was altered after the filmmaker’s death. He claimed that in the final scene, Kidman and Cruise’s characters gave their daughter Rosemary “to the pedo cult,” making an already dark script all the darker.
“That’s what’s happened at the end of the movie,” he said. He also claimed Kubrick intended this as the picture’s conclusion and argued against those who wanted to cut it. “He dies like four days later,” said Avery, 61.
Avary was referring to Kubrick submitting his final cut to Warner Bros. on March 1, 1999, which studio executives and the movie’s stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, viewed. Six days later, the acclaimed director died of a heart attack at age 70.
Eyes Wide Shut once again became a cause for wild speculation, with many wondering if it stayed true to Kubrick’s vision. The theories were further padded with the idea that Kubrick was aware of the crimes of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and similar figures.
The movie’s editor, Nigel Galt, has staunchly denied that it was cut, saying that the final edit was unchanged after Kubrick’s death. Kubrick’s personal assistant Leon Vitali has also echoed this, saying that the director “had completed his final cut.”
In her own statement, Vivian tagged Joe Rogan and included hashtags for Jeffrey Epstein, sex trafficking, the Epstein Files, and “#EliteAbuse.”
“I never heard of a missing 20 minutes at the time, I have never subsequently seen or been shown any evidence that such a section existed, and I know of no surviving material that establishes that it did,” wrote Vivian, a director and frequent collaborator of her father’s.
“When my father died, Eyes Wide Shut had reached picture lock and was moving through the final stages of post-production. It had just been shown to the studio heads...” she explained.
Vivian slammed those who seek to “sensationalize” the story. “I cannot tell you what may or may not have happened during the 30-some hours immediately after my father’s death; I was not there,” she wrote. “But unless substantive evidence emerges—and I do not regard stories from certain people who, in my opinion, are inventing them after the fact as evidence; people often want to sensationalize their part in a story, if indeed they even had a part—the story that 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after his death remains, to my mind, an actual conspiracy theory, not an established fact.”
The daughter of Kubrick and German actress Christiane Kubrick, Vivian was revealed by the Daily Beast to be promoting far-right ideology and conspiracy theories in 2021. She said that the far-right group Proud Boys “have as much right to exist as any #LGBTQ group,” and claimed her father would support this notion. In 2010, Vivian was reported to have joined the Church of Scientology. Her mother told the Guardian at the time that she had “lost” her daughter.
