The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy theory: did someone cut a crucial 20 minutes from Kubrick’s final movie?

**Name: **The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy

Age: The erotic psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (married at the time, though that isn’t so important now) was released in 1999.

Stanley Kubrick**, no?** yes. It was the great film-maker’s final movie. He died of a heart attack just days after screening his final cut to Warner Bros. His sudden death is what started it all.

**Started **all of what? The conspiracies.

Oooh, go on. OK, so there are rumours that the studio cut 20 minutes of the film after his death, including an alternative ending.

**Why would they do that? **It was too dark apparently, even by Kubrick’s standards. The theory goes that in Kubrick’s original, Cruise and Kidman’s characters sacrificed their own daughter to a child sexual abuse ring.

Perhaps it was a premonition of the Pizzagate theory? Make that Jeffrey Epstein.

**Seriously? **That’s what they say.

That’s what who say? There was an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast a couple of years ago in which the screenwriter Roger Avary said the film had been cut.

**Was **Avary involved in the making of the film? No, but on Rogan’s podcast he claimed that “as a student of Kubrick” he noticed parts of the film Kubrick wouldn’t have done himself (scenes the director would have trimmed, a “missing” narration, among other things). So it looked to Avary as if EWS had been cut after Kubrick’s death.

**And those comments helped fuel the rumours that Kubrick may have known about Epstein’s crimes, or possibly some other cult involving the global elite? **Precisely. It doesn’t help that Kubrick was no stranger to conspiracy theories. It’s claimed that he staged the first moon landing then alluded to it surreptitiously in The Shining.

Of course. Back to EWS though**. **What do people who actually worked on the film say? Nigel Galt, the movie’s editor, said in an interview last year that nothing was cut. And now Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter, has weighed in. She worked with him on several films.

And Vivian says? It’s a long X post, including: “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.”

That doesn’t completely rule out the possibility, though, does it? She goes on to say: “If indeed 20 minutes had been removed, I definitely would have found out about it eventually.” And she tags @joerogan and adds a whole bunch of hashtags including #EpsteinFiles, #GhislaineMaxwell, #SexTrafficking and #ConspiracyTheory, just to be clear who she’s talking to.

Do say: “Hmmm, should I believe family and the editor, or a load of people on Reddit?”

Don’t say: “What do you think, Joe Rogan?”