Vivian Kubrick addresses ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ lost footage rumors

Vivian Kubrick has addressed long-standing rumors regarding the existence of 20 minutes of deleted footage from her father Stanley Kubrick’s final film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. The theory suggests that an original 179-minute cut existed, which allegedly contained a more disturbing conclusion involving secret societies.

Vivian clarified on social media that she has never heard of any such missing scenes. She explained that her father had a practice of incinerating discarded material after a film was completed to prevent studios from re-editing his work. Because the film was shot in 1999, high-resolution digital backups for every scene were not standard practice. While the master negative of the finished film was preserved, the raw 35mm material and original negatives of discarded takes were destroyed.

The only modification Vivian confirmed was the use of CGI to obscure nudity in certain scenes to ensure an R rating. She noted that while the film was edited using Avid, those files were standard-definition working copies rather than high-resolution digital preserves, making a reconstruction of an alternative version impossible.