Stanley Kubrick’s daughter is addressing a popular conspiracy theory about her late father’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
For decades, theories have been circulating about the 1999 erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, which was finished just days before the legendary filmmaker died of a heart attack at age 70. The long-circulating rumors claim that Kubrick’s original cut of the 159-minute movie contained an additional 20 minutes of footage with a much darker ending that was said to have exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.
Although the movie’s editor, Nigel Galt, insisted that the final edit was Kubrick’s finished product, speculation grew even more rampant after the film’s screenwriter, Roger Avery, said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024 that he had heard secondhand reports about the alleged missing footage.
Now, the director’s youngest daughter, Vivian Kubrick — who collaborated with him on several films on and off screen — has set the record straight on the rumors in a lengthy statement on social media.
“It’s a story that has been circulating for many years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don’t know,” Vivian, 66, wrote Monday on X.
EYES WIDE SHUT: THE MISSING 20 MINUTES
— Vivian Kubrick (@ViKu1111) September 1, 2026
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
She then explained that her father (famously known for being a perfectionist) had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished so that it could not be re-edited or made into an alternate version.
“There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died,” she continued. “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.”
Vivian went on to say that she does not know the exact details of the day leading up to her father’s death because she was living in Los Angeles at the time, whereas Kubrick was at their family home in England.
“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,” she added.
Eyes Wide Shut was considered a controversial movie due to its graphic sexual content, as well as its disturbing depiction of an elite secret sex cult, which theorists later speculated was a prediction or an acknowledgment of Epstein’s crimes.
As Vivian mentioned, the film was famously altered digitally to censor its nudity scenes so that Warner Brothers could escape an NC-17 rating.
She went on to say that the film was edited on a program called Avid, but that a digital archive was not used at the time because it was still “the era of physical film distribution.” Because of that, she said, there is no surviving video or digital copy, unused negative or other physical record of the missing footage.
“But the absence of such material cuts both ways: it does not prove that those 20 minutes ever existed in the first place. That is as far as I can honestly go,” she said. “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 then criticized conspiracists for “inventing” stories to “sensationalize” Kubrick’s death, saying: “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.”
“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,” she concluded.
Vivian went on to tag people who have spread the rumors, including Rogan and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in the post.
The Independent has reached out to Warner Brothers for comment.
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