10 Greatest Movies Never Made

3. Napoleon

A biopic of Napoleon was something Stanley Kubrick obsessed over for much of his life. A 2011 book entitled Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made features scripts, research, photographs of planned locations, and a host of other things, showing just how close Kubrick came to making his epic masterpiece.

Kubrick planned to tell the famous emperor's story from birth to death with battle scenes of gigantic proportions. He allegedly amassed a library's worth of books on the French icon to attain the utmost detail and precision, which, as Kubrick is an unrelenting perfectionist, is to be expected. Despite the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, MGM forced Kubrick to move on from the project after they pulled the plug on the picture, thinking it wasn't viable financially. Sergei Bondarchuk's Napoleon themed movie, Waterloo, had bombed commercially so the studio was correct in being apprehensive, especially as the scale and size of the picture Kubrick envisioned was unprecedented.

Everyone from Jack Nicholson to Audrey Hepburn was linked with the movie and Kubrick's inability to make the film plagued him until his death. A few years ago, it was announced that Steven Spielberg was going to be adapting Kubrick's original script for a television mini-series, which gives insight into the sheer scope of Kubrick's ambition.