After the success of 2001, Kubrick planned a large-scale biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte. He "tried to see every film that was ever made on the subject", including Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) and the Soviet film series War and Peace, neither of which he liked. Kubrick also conducted research, read books about the French emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay that has since become available both on the Internet and as part of a published comprehensive collection of his research and pre-production work. Napoleon was eventually canceled due to the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of the 1968 Sergei Bondarchuk epic film version of the Leo Tolstoy novel War and Peace, as well as the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970).