There's apparently a four-and-a-half-hour cut of Ridley Scott's Napoleon out there
The theatrical cut of Ridley Scott's epic biopic clocks in at a measly two and a half hours
There’s a modern-day war currently raging amongst film fans. According to one camp, movies nowadays are way too damn long, with recent outings like Oppenheimer, Avatar: The Way Of Water, and Scorsese’s upcoming Killers Of The Flower Moon clocking in at 3 hours, 3 hours and 12 minutes, and 3 hours and 26 minutes respectively. For the other camp, favored directors—to borrow a sentiment from Joaquin Phoenix’s dramatized Napoleon—simply never make mistakes. If the man in charge says his movie works best at 3 hours and 26 minutes, then we should all be thankful that’s the version being sent to the silver screen. Often, long-runtime appreciators aren’t so lucky.
Case in point: the “fantastic,” nearly four-and-a-half-hour cut of Napoleon that director Ridley Scott just teased fans with during an interview with Empire Magazine (via Variety). Now, don’t get us wrong: the cut that is being released is still a whopping 158 minutes, in case you were worried that a single historic battle, sword swing, or dig at Napoleon’s height had been left on the cutting room floor. The longer, 270-minute version reportedly features more of Napoleon’s wife Joséphine’s life before she meets the infamous emperor.
“[Scott would] love Apple (who funded the film) to eventually screen it. But what they have now is hardly slight,” Empire’s report continues. “‘It’s an astonishing story,’ Phoenix says of Napoleon’s life. ‘Hopefully we captured some of the most interesting moments.’”
“Joaquin studies the psyche, and the psyche of Napoleon is so strange,” Vanessa Kirby, who plays Joséphine, added. “He was a dictator, a war criminal, really. [The film] couldn’t be rousing, because that man killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men, in my opinion needlessly. And for what? To get an empire, for what? In the end, it all disintegrated anyway. That psyche run wild is dangerous as hell, and very strange. And this is a portrait of that.”
Napoleon premieres in theaters November 22.