Spielberg takes on Kubrick's dream project

In an interview with Canal Plus this weekend, Steven Spielberg revealed that he's turning Stanley Kubrick's monolithic but unmade film, Napoleon, into... a TV miniseries.

"I've been developing Stanley Kubrick's screenplay," said the filmmaker, referring to a project that consumed Kubrick in the '60s. Kubrick planned to make Napoleon after 2001: A Space Odyssey but the hugely ambitious movie was killed by both MGM and then United Artists.

In the end, all that was left of Napoloeon was this rather extraordinary commemorative book published by Taschen, "the room full of Napoleon stuff" and the index of 25,000 library cards captured in Jon Ronson's doc, Kubrick's Boxes, and an almighty legend.

"The Kubrick family and I... the next project we're working on as a miniseries is Napoleon," said Spielberg, although he didn't reveal any more than that.

The 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence also began with Kubrick in the '70s, but was completed by Spielberg after Kubrick's death in 1999.

And it was terrible.