Stanley Kubrick spent the latter part of the 1960s — post “2001,” pre-“Clockwork Orange” — pulling together a movie about Napoleon.

How else do you follow the groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a titanic undertaking that reinvented the genre and how films of the genre were made? Napoleon seemed to match Kubrick’s total-control mania, his epic ambitions, and need to go big or go home.

He never got to make it. It was going to be too long, it was going to cost too much. And the Russian Sergey Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo” was going to win the race to get into theaters.

Now Steven Spielberg, guardian of the Kubrick legacy, since “Eyes Wide Shut” required finishing and “A.I.” wasn’t yet in production when SK died, is putting together plans to turn Kubrick’s work into a mini-series.

Film buffs will want to see it, pay cable will foot the bill and make an event. And nobody will have to fret that such an enterprise would cost more than it could possibly pull in from the box office.

It’s a fascinating precedent. Orson Welles, a far more interesting and humanistic director than the Big K, had many a project that never saw the light of day. Of course, Kubrick the archivist kept his preparations, notes. He had to give up “Napoleon” a couple of times. Welles skittered about, losing whatever preps he’d begun, chunks of unfinished films, etc., as he fled creditors.