Roger Avary: Warner Bros Changed Kubrick's Original Ending of ‘Eyes Wide Shut'

Back in May 2020, I polled over 175 critics, asking them to name their personal best films of the 1990s, Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” wound up at #5.

I love how Kubrick’s final film, initially met with mixed reviews, is now seen by many as this colossal masterpiece. Christopher Nolan called it “the “2001 of relationship movies.” An apt description for a film that continues to reveal its depth-filled frames some 25 years since its release.

Yesterday, Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino were on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but there’s one particular tidbit that I want to cover, unrelated to Tarantino, and having to do with Kubrick’s final film. At some point during the chat, Avary claims, as total fact, that Warner Bros interfered with Kubrick’s original cut of the film.

Avary claims that Kubrick’s intended version was meant to have a different ending, one in which Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s characters agree to give their daughter away to the two men who are part of the film’s "pedo cult.”

There’s an entire thread that's been squashed in that film and that's the the two men who follow Cruise throughout the movie, that are constantly in the background of the film, who eventually in the final shots of the film you see Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's Baby bassinet, which is totally Kubrick saying something, and the final line of the movie is coming up, you see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They're taking her away, [Cruise and Kidman] have given their daughter to the pedo cult. That's what was supposed to happen at the end of the movie.”

Avary further claims that “Eyes Wide Shut” originally had third person voice-over narration, and that Warner Bros refused to include it in the final cut:

I mean, I've known this for a long time, but I started really thinking about it over the weekend […] the film is missing a narration, it's missing a third person narration that was originally in the movie and that's because the movie was recut and changed after his death and they will deny.

There’s been quite a bit of research and writing done as to whether Warner Bros heavily edited “Eyes Wide Shut” after Kubrick’s death. Obviously, and to this day, Warners maintains that the version released was Kubrick’s intended final cut, but who knows. After production wrapped, Kubrick kept editing “Eyes Wide Shut,” for almost 18 months, and then he died.

Here’s more Avary …

Okay, so apparently he finished it. Well, that's the party line, but I think that [Warner Bros] changed the the notes, the closeups, the inserts of the notes, I think those are changed. It’s missing a narration, it's definitely missing a third person narration […] They couldn't say that Kubrick finished the movie because they hadn't done the recording of the narrator yet and so maybe they just kind of glued it together.

Further in the discussion Avary recounts an incident where Kubrick allegedly argued with executives about preserving the integrity of his movie during its screening in England.

There’s an incident where when they first screened the movie England. People who were outside — this is all secondhand by the way — of the theater could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives, and saying it’s my movie you can’t cut it, you can’t f**king cut my film. Then he died just four days later

Warner Bros maintains that, despite minor tweaking, not a single frame was removed from Kubrick's film, and that’s despite urban legends stating otherwise.

A few months ago, when asked about the cut that was released in theaters, and whether it was the one Kubrick intended to be seen, Kidman didn’t even hesitate in stating that it was the legendary filmmaker’s final version:

Oh, yeah. He had been editing it for 18 months. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough time. He was very happy with it. For him to show it to us, that is huge, if you know Stanley. And the Warners people were there. He wasn’t going back to the drawing board.

In the end, maybe Avary knows something that we don’t, but he’s sadly not shown any receipts to back up his claim, This is a conspiracy that’s been around for 25 years, that there was 20 minutes of footage that Kubrick refused to have edited from the film, and was only removed once he died. It’s never been confirmed, but boy is it a good story.