If they ever put the 4 hour version on IMAX with an intermission, I'd go see it, but I'm going to wait for Apple TV+. With as active as Napoleon was, this might as well be "History of the World in 3 Hours or Less."

I was tempted to walk out. Meh.

Sounds like a winner

I'm a history and military history buff. I was not going there to hear more about his personal life, but boy did they throw a bunch of that in. Seemed to me there were a lot of abruptly-ended scenes and now that I hear they filmed four hours and left out half for the theatrical release, that suddenly makes sense.

If they do have a couple hours of footage in the can, rather than bloating this version with it, which they will probably wind up doing, I'll be hoping for a curated 'history buff' edition with 90% of the personal-angsty stuff cut out, and any and all of the history stuff taken out of the two-hour version added in.

I should add, that as a rose aficionado, I was hoping to see something about Josephine's rose garden at Malmaison. It was so famous that Britain let ships through their blockade that brought her new rose varieties.

Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Napoleon is now available on Apple TV+.

It adds 48 minutes to an already lengthy film, resulting in a 3.5 hour total runtime.


I never saw the original theatrical cut, but just finished the Director's Cut. I thought it was decent to fairly good, but not among Scott's best.

Great battle scenes, sets, and costumes. Good cinematography. Solid acting by some of the players, including several of the mains (even though Phoenix's Napoleon is fairly inconsistent).

I agree that it did feel a little rushed/disjointed, mainly because they're trying to cover a 30ish year span during which a lot happened, so it has to move at breakneck speed. But I suspect the Director's Cut specifically helped a bit with that, as the original theatrical cut would have felt even more rushed.

And I'm sure all the history buffs were disappointed that it was heavily focused on his relationship with Josephine, rather than on just the military campaigns and political intrigues, and that a number of the battles were just snippets/vignettes with only 3 or so shown in any length - and even those are truncated.

Overall, I give the Director's Cut a 7/10, which I suspect means the original cut was more like a 5 or 6.

It's better than a lot of the other crap out there today, so it's worth watching on streaming, especially for fans of history, Napoleonic warfare, or Ridley Scott.

But it should have been a miniseries.