Martin Scorsese has revealed that his long-planned Cleopatra movie — with Angelina Jolie set to play Cleopatra VII — was torpedoed by the 2014 Sony hack and Seth Rogen‘s The Interview. More than a decade later, he’s still mad about it.
Martin Scorsese and Angelina Jolie (Credits: Variety)
Martin Scorsese’s Cleopatra Movie: What He Told Tribeca’s Crafty Series
Scorsese made the revelation in a nearly 40-minute conversation with his daughter Francesca Scorsese for Tribeca’s new YouTube interview series “Crafty.” When she asked about a movie he wished he’d made, he named Cleopatra — a project Sony had been developing since 2010 as an adaptation of Stacy Schiff’s acclaimed biography “Cleopatra: A Life,” with producer Scott Rudin attached.
“We were going to do Cleopatra at one point, and then they made fun of [Kim Jong Un], and he got mad and blew up everybody at Columbia,” Scorsese said, pointing to Rogen’s 2014 comedy about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader. “Well, tell Seth, because they ruined everything. Just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
How the Sony Hack Killed Angelina Jolie’s Cleopatra
The fallout from The Interview triggered a massive hack of Sony Pictures in late 2014, carried out by a North Korean state-sponsored group and leaking troves of confidential emails. Among them: ugly private exchanges between Rudin and then-Sony co-chair Amy Pascal, in which Rudin called Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat” and dismissed the proposed $180 million project.
According to Scorsese, his version was much further along than previously known. Eric Roth — who later co-wrote Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon — was ready on the script. “We were going. She was Cleopatra VII. It was going to be really wild,” he said.
The project never recovered. Sony hired David Scarpa for a rewrite in 2016 and Denis Villeneuve was reportedly in talks in 2017, but nothing has moved since. Scorsese, meanwhile, is in post-production on the horror film What Happens at Night, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
