Speaking with GQ, Channing Tatum let loose some details when it comes to Magic Mike XXL (aka Magic Mike 2), which he co-wrote with Reid Carolin and will return as the title star.
First thing to note for those that haven’t been paying close attention, Steven Soderbergh will not be back to direct, instead Soderbergh’s longtime second unit director, Gregory Jacobs, will be taking over at the helm for the now “retired” (from theatrical filmmaking at least) director. Tatum, however, tried what he could to get him to change his mind.
“I lobbied probably harder than anybody else,” Tatum told GQ about his efforts to get Soderbergh back as director. “We had many, many nights of heated debate. I was, ‘I don’t f–ing get it! Why?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t need it.'”
Soderbergh, it turns out, will serve as editor and cinematographer, which might be the best thing for both the film and Jacobs as he works on what will be his third feature film after Criminal and Wind Chill. “I want to be there,” Soderbergh said, “but I don’t want to be the director. I want to be a part of it. I want to be in the band, but I just don’t want to be the frontman this time.”
As for what the film will be about, we’ve already heard it will be some sort of a road trip, adventure-dramedy and Tatum sheds a little more light on that idea in this lengthy passage:
When Tatum first started sharing his idea for a movie about his stripping past, there was one story he focused on. It was about going to a strippers’ convention–thousands of women in a convention hall with one big stage on which maybe a hundred strippers appear. In fact, says Reid Carolin, Tatum’s friend and producing partner who wrote the actual script, that was the first thing Tatum told him about those days: “I want to do the story of when I’m in a dark U-Haul with a bunch of these guys and we’re doing drugs driving up to the stripper convention.” Soderbergh says he steered them away from it, telling them, “You know what? It’s too big–that idea alone is a movie.”
Now it is a movie that they are going to make, as a sequel to the first. Rumored to be called Magic Mike XXL, it’ll be an on-the-road adventure, inspired by the two strippers’ conventions Tatum attended. “We cut out so much stuff that was just really juicy fun things to happen in a movie that you haven’t seen before,” he says. One of the conventions he attended was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They went en masse in his buddy’s van and danced for 3,000 women. “The women would come from miles and miles around,” he recalls. “Then you lock the doors and you say all bets are off. It gets zany and crazy, and it’s a wild ride. It’s an incubator for insanity. It doesn’t matter almost what you do onstage. I don’t want to put anything in black and white on a page, but if you’ve been to one, you know how crazy it gets, and now pour kerosene on that. You’ve seen Magic Mike–now multiply that. Mob mentality. It’s just exponentially crazier. I thought it was absolutely insane.”
The film is currently slated for a July 3, 2015 release, which makes me wonder… wouldn’t a Cannes 2015 premiere be pretty cool?
