The Walking Dead Producer Adapting Unmade Stanley Kubrick Treatment

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's final film was 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, and despite passing away months [...]

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's final film was 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, and despite passing away months before that film's release, he has still left behind an impressive legacy, with The Walking Dead producer and frequent Stephen King director Frank Darabont recently confirming that he's working on bringing a treatment Kubrick wrote in the '50s to life as a film. Based on Darabont's description of the story, however, the film will be less like his more unsettling stories along the lines of The Shining or A Clockwork Orange, and likely a more grounded interpretation of real-world events, with it also being unknown when the project could move forward.

"I spent the last year writing a script. And I know when I'm hitting on all cylinders or not. I was hitting on all cylinders," Darabont shared with the Post Mortem podcast, per Dread Central. "It's a magnificent project based on a treatment that Stanley Kubrick wrote in the late '50s — an incredible Civil War piece. It's a very meaningful script and [when] I finished, I said, 'This is the best thing I've ever done.' And we shopped it around town and we didn't get a single meeting."

Darabont and Kubrick aren't the only major names attached to the project, as the filmmaker also confirmed that Alien and Blade Runner director Ridley Scott was also attached as a producer.

"It's not just me, the schmuck recluse living up north," Darabont detailed. "Ridley Scott was one of the producers on it! And it's Kubrick's idea that he developed with Shelby Foote, a noted Civil War historian."

If this project ends up coming to fruition, it wouldn't be the first Kubrick project to be developed posthumously, as Steven Spielberg previously helmed A.I. Artificial Intelligence back in 2001. Kubrick initially secured the rights to the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss back in the '70s, enlisting a number of writers over the years to find the right way to translate the journey into a film. In the mid-'90s, Kubrick somewhat abandoned the idea of the film ever coming together, as he didn't think special effects could accurately convey the futuristic world, and handed the project over to Spielberg officially.

Stay tuned for details on Darabont's efforts to bring the concept to life.

Are you hoping the filmmaker can move forward with the project? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars.

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