Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum Are Making a Male-Stripper Movie
Director Steven Soderbergh kept saying he was serious about retiring in a few years. Nobody believed him. He continued to insist he wasn't kidding. We remained skeptical. Well, it appears that the retirement might not be happening just yet: It was announced today that Soderbergh has signed on to direct a movie based on "G.I. Joe" star Channing Tatum's early life as a stripper.
The film will be called "Magic Mike" and will be a story about the world of male strippers:
Tatum plays the title character, who schools a young dancer in how to hustle on and off the stage. It's a wild summer of dancing, partying and women.
For his part, Soderbergh said in a statement that "It's sexy, funny and shocking" and suggested that they were modeling the movie after "Saturday Night Fever."
Thinking about Soderbergh's filmography, he's dabbled in sex and risqué subject matter with "The Girlfriend Experience," but people who went to that movie just to see Sasha Grey naked were probably upset that the director used her prostitute character as a device to discuss larger themes of power and desire in America. "Magic Mike" doesn't sound like it'll be nearly as cerebral, especially since Tatum has said that his time as a stripper back in Tampa in the late 1990s (at a place called Male Encounter) was pretty crazy. So perhaps it's best to imagine this movie having the freewheeling spirit of Soderbergh's "Ocean's" movies with the comedy of "The Informant!"
If you're keeping track, Soderbergh will have two films coming out this year: "Haywire" (which stars Tatum) and "Contagion." After that? He's got "Liberace" with Michael Douglas and the big-screen version of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." Somewhere in there, "Magic Mike" will be happening too. And then he's retiring! He means it! We never completely believed him, but we definitely can't believe a movie about male strippers is what got him to postpone those plans.
