Steven Soderbergh has been dropping hints that he may not be behind the lens for the next Magic Mike film. The Academy-Award winning film director is planning to take a producer role instead and is considering letting the titular star, Channing Tatum, take the directorial seat.
“I want to help. I have some proprietary feelings about it, obviously. I want to make sure it gets done and done well, so we meet every couple of weeks to talk about where it’s going,” Soderbergh said at a press junket for his upcoming HBO Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. “But it’s gonna be good. It’s a good idea. It’s not a retread. And there will be more time spent with the characters – all of them.”
Soderbergh added that the plot of the movie is already in place and the original cast is all set to reprise their roles.
“We actually just had a meeting about it the other day,” he added. “It’s getting pretty far ‘along. They’ve got a good idea. There were some stories and events that [titular star] Channing [Tatum] lived through that we just couldn’t fit in the first one. One of them is a really hilarious and very cinematic idea that we reluctantly didn’t put in the first film, because it was such a big idea you could build a whole film out of it — but we didn’t want to build that film out of it. It’s perfect for this, though.”
Magic Mike 2 is expected to be a “ridiculous and fun road movie” and more of a “broad comedy” than what we’ve seen before.
No target release date has been announced yet.