Everything Ridley Scott and Apple have said about the extended Napoleon cut
Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s 157-minute epic on (who else) Napoleon Bonaparte, is now finally streaming on Apple TV Plus. The two-and-a-half-hour film captures Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, and his rise as a Great Man, a great general, and a great little fucking weirdo. In particular, the movie is concerned with how his graceless climb led him to claim France (and beyond) for himself, while also constantly being bodied by his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby, aka the new Sue Storm). He is never chill, but he is always, as Polygon’s Joshua Rivera put it in his review, “history’s most accomplished cuck.”
Even at two hours and 38 minutes, Napoleon has to strip out a lot of Napoleon to tell its story. Luckily, before the release, Scott promised there is a longer cut, the directorial vision he prefers. So when will that version be viewable on Apple? Well, that’s tricky.
Scott first announced a “fantastic” four-and-a-half-hour cut in September, stating that the longer cut featured even more of Joséphine. In October, Scott went further, telling Total Film Magazine that the four-and-a-half-hour cut was currently in production, with “I’m working on it. It was four [hours] 10 [minutes] this morning,” Scott told the magazine at the time. “And so what will happen is, we’ll screen [the theatrical cut] first with Sony, and then it has its run, and then the perfect thing is that [the director’s cut] goes to streaming, and we have four hours 10 minutes.”
Apple, in response, said nothing, and did not reply to Polygon’s request for comment.
By November, Scott seemed to be explaining to Sky News that there was no longer an extended cut at all, citing the “bum ache factor” of people getting weary in their seats. “I think that’s what the director’s cut is — the two and a half hour — that’s the truth of it,” he said. “Because I learned early on, basically from all the films I’ve done, but also from early days as a commercial maker. Am I communicating and how tight can I be to
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