In the 1980s, Stanley Kubrick spent four years working on a movie. It became his “Premier League of unrealised projects”

Stanley Kubrick spent four years in the 1980s considering an adventure film based on H Rider Haggard’s 1891 novel *The Saga of Eric Brighteyes*. A longtime assistant later ranked it among Kubrick’s most significant unrealised projects, suggesting it might have been his next film had he lived.

The article says little is known about why the project stalled, though Kubrick often developed several ambitious ideas at once, each demanding substantial money and production resources. His other unrealised films included a Napoleon biopic and the Holocaust drama *Aryan Papers*; *Eyes Wide Shut*, released in 1999, was his final film.