YMMV / Eyes Wide Shut

• Adaptation Displacement: Most people are more familiar with this film than with Traumnovelle.
• Award Snub: It received zero Academy Award nominations.
• Awesome Music: Par for the course in a Stanley Kubrick film:
  • The background music to the infamous masked orgy ritual, which also doubles as Nightmare Fuel.
  • György Ligeti's Musica Ricerata no. 2 is used to great effect.
  • Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2 is also used effectively.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The average person doesn't know much in the movie aside from nude Nicole Kidman (at times kissing naked Tom Cruise, as seen on the poster) and the famous masked orgy.
• Ending Fatigue: After The Reveal, the film still goes on for some time. Probably justified, as it highlights that the mystery, captivating and intriguing though it is, is ultimately of secondary importance compared to the issues of lust, trust, and fidelity. There's also the possibility that the reveal is false anyway...
• Everyone Is Satan in Hell: A common conspiracy theory, sometimes repeated semi-jokingly, is that Kubrick was murdered by the Illuminati/The CIA/some other powerful group because the orgy scene, held and conducted by masked figures implied to consist of the Global Elite, was too accurate.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: During its release, it received much better reception and appreciation in European territories and in Japan than in the Anglosphere.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When the wife tells her tale to the protagonist, what you get to see is the face of Tom Cruise listening to Nicole Kidman — his wife — describing how he doesn't understand women. The couple's real-life consecutive break-up makes this almost prophetic.
  • A secret society that hosts orgies doesn't seem that ludicrous in late 2010s with Katie Couric mentioning in her memoir that she attended convicted sex trafficker and offender Jeffrey Epstein's private party which eerily resembled one in the film.
    • As an addition, journalist Larry Celona, who acts as the film's journalistic advisor and wrote the news article for Mandy's death in the newspaper that Bill reads, also wrote a news article about Epstein's death in Real Life.
• One-Scene Wonder: Alan Cumming only has one brief scene as an unnamed hotel clerk seemingly interested in Bill, but he gives easily one of the most memorable performances in the film.
• Signature Scene: The entire masked "ball" sequence.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Alice mostly disappears after the first act, robbing us of getting more of one of Nicole Kidman's most engaging performances ever.
• Vindicated by History: Eyes Wide Shut divided audiences and critics upon release, with an attitude toward sex that critics viewed as "dated" and a plot considered exploitatively bizarre. In the years since, the perception has evolved and Kubrick's approach is widely regarded as "timeless", with the 2019 Epstein's scandal giving the film a renewed relevance.

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