Steven Soderbergh to Team With Channing Tatum For Stripper Comedy Magic Mike
Posted 04.30.11 by Ryan
Do you like comedies with plenty of "pole" jokes?
Deadline reports that Ocean's Eleven and Erin Brockovich director Steven Soderbergh has agreed to direct Magic Mike, a movie about male strippers starring Channing Tatum. The movie comes from Tatum's own life, having earned his living as a stripper when he was 19. Soderbergh was pitched the idea while he and Tatum were working on the upcoming espionage drama Haywire.
When Channing talked to me about this, I thought it was one of the best ideas I'd ever heard for a movie. I said I wanted in immediately. It's sexy, funny and shocking. We're using Saturday Night Fever as our model, so hopefully we're on the right track.
Tatum will play Mike, who teaches a young dancer how to hustle on and off the stage during a summer filled with partying, women, and, of course, dancing. "This was a wild and pivotal time in my life and I couldn't be more thrilled to go down the rabbit hole with Steven," said Tatum. Reid Carolin (Earth Made of Glass) wrote the script.
The project sounds promising. There's only one problem: isn't Soderbergh retiring?
Matt Damon first mentioned Soderbergh's intention to retire in December of last year, with the director responding in January that he indeed had "an exit strategy" and months later admitted that the "tyranny of narrative is starting to really weigh on me," and that he only planned to direct two more movies. Make that three.
Soderbergh has both Haywire and the thriller Contagion opening this year, and then The Playlist reports that Soderbergh will shoot Magic Mike in September/October around the time Contagion opens on October 21st. Soderbergh then plans to shoot a remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney in February and the biopic Liberace next summer with Damon and Michael Douglas.
After Liberace, Soderbergh maintains that he will call "cut" for the last time. That is, unless yet another project comes along.