Martin Scorsese Reveals Sony Hack Destroyed Angelina Jolie’s Cleopatra

Martin Scorsese discussed how a Cleopatra film he planned to direct with Angelina Jolie ultimately did not happen.

Martin Scorsese reveals that his long-gestating historical epic starring Angelina Jolie as the Egyptian queen collapsed entirely because of the infamous November 2014 cyberattack tied to Seth Rogen’s North Korea comedy The Interview, Variety reported. Speaking on the first episode of the Tribeca original series Crafty, the director explained that the production was fully prepared to move forward before studio operations were upended by the leak.

The project had gathered significant momentum years prior, drawing interest from a string of high-profile filmmakers. Back in 2010, Jolie, filmmaker James Cameron, and Sony Pictures considered a PG-13 3D feature adapted from Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Cleopatra: A Life, with Brian Helgeland handling script duties and Scott Rudin attached to produce, as Dark Horizons noted. After Cameron shifted his focus to the Avatar sequels, the director’s chair saw interest from David Fincher, Paul Greengrass, and Ang Lee.

Script Ready and Angelina Jolie Attached Before the Fallout

Scorsese recounted to his daughter Francesca Scorsese on Crafty that screenwriter Eric Roth—who later penned the director’s 2023 feature Killers of the Flower Moon—had finished the screenplay. We were going to do it. Eric Roth was ready on the script. Everyone was ready. It was Angelina Jolie, Scorsese stated, according to The Playlist. The director expressed lingering frustration over the abandoned venture, noting, We were gonna do Cleopatra at one point, and then they made fun of Kim Jong Un, and he got mad and blew up everybody at Columbia. Seth Rogen, right? And then he got mad, and [it] ruined Cleopatra.

While Rogen was not personally responsible for scrapping the film, the November 2014 hack by a group attempting to block the release of The Interview—a comedy revolving around a fictional plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—unleashed thousands of internal communications. Among the leaked files were sharp email exchanges from producer Scott Rudin labeling Jolie a minimally talented spoiled brat in messages sent to then-Sony co-chair Amy Pascal, as Variety detailed. The ensuing fallout fractured relationships across the studio and stalled major prestige undertakings.

A History of Hollywood Dead Ends for the Egyptian Queen

The sudden collapse of Scorsese’s vision added another casualty to a notoriously cursed cinematic property. Ever since Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 historical drama—which famously bloated studio budgets and entered Hollywood lore as a financial disaster—subsequent attempts to bring the ruler’s story back to the screen have repeatedly faltered. Following Fincher’s departure from the Sony development pipeline, Jolie remained eager to collaborate with Scorsese on a gritty, unconventional take on the historical figure.

The property briefly resurfaced years later in 2017 when Denis Villeneuve was linked to the material following his work on Blade Runner 2049, while Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins later pursued a separate iteration in the early 2020s. Yet none of these efforts reached production, leaving Scorsese’s near-miss as one of the industry’s most notable unmade collaborations.

Recalling the ambitious scale of the abandoned film, Scorsese noted, She was gonna be Cleopatra VII. It was gonna be really wild. When Francesca expressed disappointment over the lost opportunity, her father repeated his wry assessment of the studio’s digital catastrophe: Well, tell Seth because they ruined everything just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor, as noted by Avclub.

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