BEGUN, THE NAPOLEONIC WARS HAVE: Napoleon heralds the return of the man’s movie.
It is a stereotype to suggest that all a male viewer wants to watch at his local cinema is bloodshed. Yet there is going to be an enormous amount of that on offer during the rest of 2023 (although Oppenheimer, bizarrely, is promising extended scenes of nudity and sex from its stars Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy instead; whatever floats your boat). The return of such maestros as David Fincher, Martin Scorsese and Scott to cinemas is welcome — even if all their pictures had to be funded by streaming services — but it is also a reminder of how few younger filmmakers are emerging with this kind of picture.
We shall see whether Napoleon is another [Ridley] Scott classic, or a disappointment, but its early marketing suggests that the now eighty-five-year-old director has returned with a big, manly epic, full of swagger and panache. When it emerges this Thanksgiving, cinemas will be awash with viscera and blood — metaphorically speaking — and if it proves a critical and commercial hit (Scorsese’s picture has already won rave reviews at Cannes) then we can tentatively look forward to a renaissance in male-oriented pictures. I’m still holding out for a Lord Nelson biopic, but there’s Gladiator 2 on its way next year, with persistent rumors of a Russell Crowe cameo. Who knows: if enough men have films aimed at them again, they might even start going to the cinema in considerable numbers instead of snoozing in front of Netflix in their underwear. And if you build it — and do it well — they will, let’s hope, come.
Meanwhile, there is another Napoleonic project in the works: Steven Spielberg “Mounting A Big Production” For Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’; Project Is Set As Seven-Part Limited Series For HBO.
One of Stanley Kubrick’s lost projects, a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, has been in the works for HBO for the last seven years.
Steven Spielberg, who has been involved for at least ten years, now says he is “mounting a big production” and the project will become a seven-part series for the premium cable network.
Deadline understands that the project is still in the development stages but it is nearing a series order.
Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, The Fabelmans director said, “With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley’s original script Napoloeon. We are working on Napoleon as a seven-part limited series,” he said.
Kubrick himself would likely be quite happy with the miniseries format for Napoleon. In an interview discussing his brilliant 1975 film Barry Lyndon (which grew out of the research he had begun for the stillborn Napoleon project) with his biographer, French film critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick said, “I have had a complete set of Thackeray sitting on my bookshelf at home for years, and I had to read several of his novels before reading Barry Lyndon. At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film. This problem of length, by the way, is now wonderfully accommodated for by the television miniseries which, with its ten- to twelve-hour length, pressed on consecutive nights, has created a completely different dramatic form.”