Vivian Kubrick, the daughter of the late director Stanley Kubrick, has addressed conspiracy theories about her father’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, conspiracies spread, in part, a few years ago by podcaster Joe Rogan and his guest, filmmaker Roger Avary.
“You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut. 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. There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died,” Kubrick posted on X.
“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. I guess you could stop reading right here,” Kubrick continued, clarifying she wasn’t in “a position to know everything that may have happened before or immediately after my father’s death” as she was in Los Angeles to score a movie at the time.
EYES WIDE SHUT: THE MISSING 20 MINUTES
You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut. 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… pic.twitter.com/hsgllDKJnV
— Vivian Kubrick (@ViKu1111) September 1, 2026
“The only alteration I heard about at the time was the use of CGI—computer-generated figures—to obscure some of the nudity in the orgy scene, which Warner Brothers wanted in order to secure an R rating for the film. But I did not hear that any shots or scenes were removed,” Kubrick wrote.
“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, I assume with a temporary music track, while the final sound mix and some of the music work were still to be completed. This was 1999, in the era of physical film distribution.”
As Kubrick explained, Eyes Was Shut was edited on Avid, a process that didn’t include any “permanent digital archive people imagine today.” After further elaborating on the negative creation and editing process of the time, Kubrick added, “I have no knowledge of whether any of the Avid editorial material from the production still exists.”
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
Kubrick suggested the University of the Arts London might know more as 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.
“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,” Kubrick posted.
“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. 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.”
After mourning her father, Kubrick said she “involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously” and said she would have found out about any missing footage from Eyes Wide Shut had it existed.
Curiously, Kubrick ended her posts with a slew of hashtags about the Epstein Files and tagging conspiracy-friendly podcasters Joe Rogan, Alex Jones and Julian Dorey. In his December 2024 podcast with Rogan, Avary not only claimed there was 20 minutes of missing footage from Eyes Wide Shut but that its original ending was altered by Warner Bros.
Sitting opposite Quentin Tarantino during the podcast, Avary claimed the studio changed the original ending over Kubrick’s objections – only for the filmmaker to die a few days later.
Avary claimed Eyes Wide Shut was originally meant to end with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s characters giving their child away to a “pedo cult,” which suggested Stanley Kubrick, in 1999, may have somehow been aware of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes involving the rich and powerful years before they were publicly exposed.
Avary maintained the “party line” about Eyes Wide Shut is that the theatrical release is Kubrick’s intended version – even Nicole Kidman has stated that’s the case – but that it’s clear to him that the studio meddled with the film after Kubrick died.
Warner Bros. has long maintained that the film they released is Kubrick’s version.
