The daughter of Stanley Kubrick has given her thoughts on a conspiracy theory about a missing 20 minutes from 1999 thriller Eyes Wide Shut that was supposedly removed due to its connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

The late filmmaker’s last work starred Tom Cruise as a Manhattan doctor who is shocked to learn that his wife (Nicole Kidman) has considered cheating on him, embarking on a night that leads to him taking part in an orgy organised by a secret society. The film’s final cut was submitted on March 1, 1999, with Kubrick dying six days later. The movie was released that summer and received a positive reception from critics and audiences, becoming Kubrick’s highest-grossing film.

For years, a rumour has circulated that the director’s original cut contained an extra 20 minutes, containing a much darker ending that would have exposed the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in 2008 for soliciting sex from a minor, and indicted for sex trafficking in 2019, prior to his suicide in custody in August of that year.

The Independent reports that opinions vary on the footage’s existence, with editor Nigel Galt insisting the final cut was the one shown in cinemas, while the film’s screenwriter Roger Avery told the Joe Rogan Podcast in 2024 that he had heard stories about the excised scenes.

Cont.
University of the Arts London. They hold the official archive of my father’s surviving papers, production materials and other records, spanning his entire career, including Eyes Wide Shut. But to my knowledge, there is no surviving cache of Avid rushes from the film.

So… pic.twitter.com/5Zr3hzSWkI

— Vivian Kubrick (@ViKu1111) September 1, 2026

Composer Vivian Kubrick, the filmmaker’s daughter and collaborator on many films including Eyes Wide Shut, has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to release a lengthy statement on the rumours.

“You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut,” she began. “It’s a story that has been circulating for many years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don’t know. For context, my father always had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished, specifically to prevent the studio from later re-editing his work or creating alternative versions.”

She went on to reveal that she had no knowledge of the “missing” 20 minutes at the time of filming, nor has she seen anything in the years since that has led her to believe it might be true. She discussed the process of the picture’s final cut being “locked”, and her doubts as to whether such material would have been preserved had it existed.

“But the absence of such material cuts both ways: it does not prove that those 20 minutes ever existed in the first place,” she countered, before concluding: “That is as far as I can honestly go. 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.”

She said that she did not regard as evidence stories “from certain people who, in my opinion, are inventing them after the fact as evidence; people often want to sensationalise their part in a story, if indeed they even had a part.”

Kubrick concluded: “Finally, this much I’m certain of: if indeed 20 minutes had been removed, I definitely would have found out about it eventually. Once the fog of agony had lifted, I involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously.” Podcasters Joe Rogan and Alex Jones are tagged in the final post in the thread, which can be read in full above.

Last year, a rare personal print of Stanley Kubrick’s short film Day Of The Fight was screened at the BFI Southbank as part of its Film On Film festival.

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