Tom Cruise’s Most Controversial Film With Alleged Epstein Link Just Dropped Free to Stream

Eyes Wide Shut just popped up on Tubi for free, which means Kubrick’s most argued-over movie is back in the discourse whether you’re ready or not.

Why this one still hits a nerve

Released in 1999, Stanley Kubrick’s final and most controversial film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and dives headfirst into masked rituals, sexual politics, and shadowy power games. That was provocative enough back then. Now, after years of real-world revelations about abuse and influence, people are rewatching it with a fresh (and much darker) frame of reference. The Jeffrey Epstein conversation keeps surfacing for a reason.

A quick refresher on the movie itself

Cruise plays Bill Harford, a Manhattan doctor who comes unglued after his wife Alice (Kidman) admits a fleeting sexual fantasy. He wanders into an elite secret society’s ritual, and from there the film slides into a paranoid maze where money and power protect everything and everyone you can’t touch.

The Epstein parallels people keep pointing to

Is Kubrick’s nightmare accidentally (or intentionally) echoing a world that looks uncomfortably like the Epstein scandal? Larry Smith, the film’s cinematographer, was asked about that and basically said the scenario has become a lot less far-fetched in light of what we’ve learned (via It Happened in Hollywood).

"There’s so many conspiracy theories out there now, it’s hard to know what’s to be believed and what isn’t. But I think we’re intelligent enough to understand just how the cards are stacked, aren’t we?"

The ugly overlap is hard to ignore: Epstein was accused of running a private circuit that involved powerful men and economically vulnerable women, including minors, insulated by jets, private islands, and exclusive social circles. Kubrick’s film maps eerily onto that kind of structure, down to the performative secrecy and the sense that rules only apply to people without access.

• Elite spaces with guarded entry and coded rituals
• Powerful men shielded by money, influence, and connections
• Vulnerable targets on the receiving end of that power imbalance

Was Kubrick trying to call out Hollywood?

This is where the fanbase splits. Some swear he was taking a swing at real elites. Others think he was doing what he always did: digging into how desire and status warp people, no matter the setting.

For context, Eyes Wide Shut is adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story, and a lot of the disturbing elements trace back to the source material. So if you’re looking for a smoking gun aimed at a specific person or industry, you won’t find it onscreen. What the movie does do is lay out a system where power has no boundaries and then let that system quietly devour anyone who stumbles into it.

The bottom line

Whether you see Eyes Wide Shut as a blunt parable about power or as uncomfortably close to our recent headlines, it plays differently now than it did in 1999. Give it a rewatch and decide for yourself.

Eyes Wide Shut is streaming free on Tubi in the U.S.