Cary Fukunaga set to try and make the film Stanley Kubrick couldn't

True Detective director apparently wants to make Napoleon an HBO miniseries

After completing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick spent years trying to make a film about French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, writing a screenplay, scouting locations, talking to Jack Nicholson about starring and allegedly enlisting 50,000 men from the Romanian Army to be extras, but it never came to fruition.

Steven Spielberg has since tried to get the elusive project off the ground, eyeing Baz Luhrmann as its director, though this ultimately failed too.

But now the “famous film that never was” has a shot at reaching the big screen once more thanks to True Detective and Beasts of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga.

During a retrospective on the director at De Montfort University in Leicester last week, Kubrick’s brother-in-law Jan Harlan apparently told the audience that the Fukunaga will be bringing Napoleon to HBO as a 6-hour miniseries.

Kubrick’s original script treatment for the film, along with essays analysing it, was published in Alison Castle’s textbook Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made.

(via Collider)