cleopatra Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Well, duh. That's what you're thinking after reading that headline. Of course Steven Soderbergh is going to make a live-action 3D rock 'n' roll musical about Cleopatra. He couldn't find a backer for the animated all-female pop opera about Nikola Tesla, and the black-and-white German-language kabuki play about Attila the Hun fell through, so naturally the live-action 3D rock 'n' roll musical about Cleopatra would have to be his next choice. Anybody could have seen that coming.

Soderbergh, who has directed about 20 theatrical features covering about 15 different genres and styles, seems determined to make his most unusual film yet. Variety says it's called Cleo, it's budgeted at $30 million, and Soderbergh is pursuing Catherine Zeta-Jones (whom he worked with in Traffic and Ocean's Twelve) to play Ms. Patra and Hugh Jackman to be her Marc Antony. We know they can both sing. But can they sing in 3D??

Oh, and in case it didn't sound weird enough already, the music is by indie rock band Guided By Voices (founded in 1983; disbanded in 2004) with a script by the band's former bass player (and sometime author), James Greer. Soderbergh is apparently a GBV fan -- one of their songs appeared in his Full Frontal, and the frontman, Robert Pollard, provided some music for Bubble.

Soderbergh is a busy guy. His four-hour Che Guevara biopic is about to be released, he's just finished a whistleblower comedy-drama called The Informant starring Matt Damon, he's preparing to make a Liberace biopic starring Michael Douglas, and his next project, The Girlfriend Experience, will be released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD, and on the HDNet movie channel. For an extra fee, Soderbergh will come to your house and act it out for you. Cleo will have to wait at least until after Girlfriend Experience, and maybe after the Liberace thing. And who knows, in the meantime he might decide to make a futuristic outer-space epic about Benjamin Franklin and Charo. You never know with that guy!

The 1963 epic Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor in the title role, is often mistaken for being a financial flop. But it was actually one of the highest grossing pictures of its year. It couldn't turn a profit right away because its cost was just too high and so it may have seemed like a disaster originally, but after so many years it eventually made money. If the film were made today for an equivalent cost, it might not be as successful. Its budget would be close to $300 million. Judging from the grosses of other recent epics of this kind, it probably wouldn't come close -- even with international box office -- to making its money back, let alone the original's inflation-adjusted earnings of $442 million.

So, producer Scott Rudin will have to be tighter with the cash when he goes into production on a new Cleopatra film, which will be based on a book by Pulitzer-Prize winner Stacy Schiff due in 2009. Columbia Pictures bought the rights to this unfinished book based on a 10-page proposal for a reported seven figures (that's at least a million bucks, so already the budget is rising). It is expected to spotlight the Egyptian queen's strengths as a ruler as opposed to her reputation as a lover. Hopefully she will be played by someone closer in appearance than Taylor, though I would like to see Taylor have some sort of cameo.