Spielberg developing STANLEY KUBRICK’S NAPOLEON as a TV miniseries. Uh. Okay.

Apparently Stanley Kubrick’s dream project was one centered around Napoleon. Displaying my ignorance, I will cop to having had no goddamn idea about this. Well, Uncle Steve knew about this project. And armed with this knowledge, the Gracious Alien (c’mon, we all know he is an alien) has taken about developing the project.

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Even though he put “Robopocalypse” on hold to figure out the script, 2013 is still shaping up to be a very busy and exciting year for Steven Spielberg. He was recently named as the jury president for the upcomingCannes Film Festival, he’s producing “Jurassic Park IV,“ which stomps back into theaters next year, he’s working with Tom Hanks on another “Band Of Brothers“-esque series for HBO, and now he’s making an unrealized dream project from one of the greatest filmmakers of all time come back to life.

“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick‘s screenplay — for a miniseries not for a motion picture — about the life of Napoleon. Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, a long time ago,” Spielberg told French network Canal+. That’s really about it. There are no details on if he’ll direct or how far along into development it is, but Spielberg is working with Kubrick’s estate on the project.

As devotees of Kubrick know, this is probably the grandaddy of all of the helmer’s unrealized projects. “Napoleon” was massively researched, with literally tens of thousands of location photos, slides of imagery and endless notes and details about the historic leader that filled up boxes upon boxes upon boxes in Kubrick’s archives (so much in fact, that it formed the foundation of a rather amazing book on the subject). But the movie was never to be. MGM and United Artists both balked at producing the movie, which would have required thousands of extras and more, saying it was too risky in the wake of expensive endeavors like 1968’s “War And Peace” and 1970’s “Waterloo” that struggled to make their money back. Kubrick would eventually tackle “Barry Lyndon,” which takes place 15 years before the Napoleonic wars, but he still longed to make the movie. He even drafted screenplays, with the 1969 version available right here.