A rumor that has circulated for more than 25 years got a direct response this week from the person closest to the man at the center of it.
On Monday, Vivian Kubrick addressed the long-held claim that approximately 20 minutes were cut from her father Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, after his death in 1999. Writing on X, she said she never heard anything about missing footage at the time and has seen no evidence of it since, according to a report by Deadline.
The conspiracy theory holds that the removed footage drew a connection between the film's secretive elite society and Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring. The claim has persisted for decades online.
Vivian was direct in her post. "You know, this is as good a time as any to finally address the missing 20 minutes from Eyes Wide Shut," she wrote. "It's a story that has been circulating for many years, so let me tell you what I actually know and don't know."
She explained that her father had a consistent practice of destroying unused material. "For context, my father always had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished, specifically to prevent the studio from later re-editing his work or creating alternative versions," she wrote.
On the specific claim of missing footage, she was clear. "There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died. 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 acknowledged one gap in her knowledge. She was not in England immediately after her father died, having had to travel from Los Angeles for the funeral. She said the only change she heard about at the time was CGI used to obscure nudity in the film's orgy scene in order to secure an R rating. She added that the film had reached picture lock before his death.
She directed anyone seeking production records to the University of the Arts London, which holds her father's archive, including materials related to Eyes Wide Shut.
Still, she was careful not to make an absolute claim in either direction. "So even if 20 minutes had in fact been removed after his death, I seriously doubt we should expect a surviving video or digital copy, unused negative or other obvious physical record of it to be sitting somewhere today," she wrote. "But the absence of such material cuts both ways: it does not prove that those 20 minutes ever existed in the first place."
She ended with her firmest statement on the matter. "I cannot tell you what may or may not have happened during the 30-some hours immediately after my father's death; I was not there. But unless substantive evidence emerges — and I do not regard stories from certain people who, in my opinion, are inventing them after the fact as evidence; people often want to sensationalize their part in a story, if indeed they even had a part — 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," she wrote.
No new evidence has emerged to support the theory. The University of the Arts London holds the archive that would most likely contain any relevant production records.