Stanley Kubrick's daughter denies that there are 20 missing minutes from Eyes Wide Shut

Vivian then gets fairly into the weeds of what editing a film in 1999 actually entailed, but the fact of the matter is that Eyes Wide Shut was shot and edited on film, meaning that it couldn’t be altered as easily as the digital films of 2026 can be. “Once the negative itself had been cut, you couldn’t simply undo those cuts and rearrange the film: each cut destroyed a frame at both the head and tail of the shot,” she writes. “This was not an era in which every piece of editorial media was automatically retained on servers for decades, and I have no knowledge of whether any of the Avid editorial material from the production still exists.” But while she hedges throughout with statements like “I have no knowledge” or that she hasn’t “heard anything,” she brings the post to a fairly definitive anti-conspiracy conclusion: 

“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.

Finally, this much I’m certain of: if indeed 20 minutes had been removed, I definitely would have found out about it eventually. Once the fog of agony had lifted, I involved myself very closely in protecting my father’s work and took that responsibility extremely seriously.” 

As for who she’s referring to with “people who sensationalize their part in a story,” we might suspect one of them could be Roger Avery who, according to The Daily Beast, has referred to himself as a “student of Kubrick” and claimed that the original ending of the film featured Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s characters selling their “to the pedo cult.” This was argued during a 2024 appearance on—wait for it—The Joe Rogan Experience, where Avery also claimed that Kubrick was dead just a couple days after advocating for this. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the film’s editor Nigel Galt also maintains, like Vivian, that Kubrick’s final edit is more or less the film that was released.