Scorsese's Cleopatra shows how one hack can bury an epic

What does it take to kill a Martin Scorsese Roman epic with Angelina Jolie in the lead? Not a box-office flop, not a creative fight, but, if the director is to be believed, a North Korean dictator who didn't get a joke. It sounds like a punchline. We think it's closer to a diagnosis.

A joke with a real wound underneath

The story surfaced this week from the first episode of Tribeca's series Crafty, where Scorsese talked with his daughter Francesca. As Variety reports, he said the Jolie-starring project was nixed because of Seth Rogen and the Sony hack. His words, as quoted by several outlets: "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." Jolie, he added, "was gonna be Cleopatra VII. It was gonna be really wild."

Some caveats are essential. Rogen was not personally responsible, and IBTimes notes that Scorsese never said precisely why the project ended, that Sony has not publicly responded, and that his account hasn't been independently verified. The tone was clearly teasing: "tell Seth, because they ruined everything."

The hack didn't kill Cleopatra; it removed everything that protected it

Here is our reading, and it is an interpretation, not an established fact. A project like this lives on trust: between a studio executive, a producer, a star and a director. The 2014 leak turned that trust into public property. Among the thousands of exposed emails was Scott Rudin calling Jolie "a minimally talented spoiled brat" in a message to Amy Pascal, then Sony co-chair. Rudin's remarks were private and published without his consent.

Think about what that does to a film that needs a huge budget and a star at the center. Sony, according to IBTimes, delayed projects, reviewed deals and reshuffled executives afterward. We suspect an epic is the first thing to go in that kind of housecleaning, because it is the most expensive promise on the slate. It doesn't need to be cancelled by decree. It only needs everyone who believed in it to be distracted, embarrassed or gone.

That is the fragile part of studio-era ambition. We tend to imagine a big film as a monolith. In practice it is a stack of fragile favors, and a scandal that has nothing to do with the film can pull out the bottom one.

Cleopatra was already a cursed project, and that matters

Before we crown the hack as the sole villain, a dose of skepticism. TheWrap points out that Hollywood's interest in a Jolie-led Cleopatra was public for years, with names such as David Fincher, James Cameron, Paul Greengrass and Ang Lee reported as attached or considered at various points. Afterward, David Scarpa was hired for a rewrite in 2016, and Denis Villeneuve was reportedly in talks in 2017. In our view, a project that passes through that many hands is not a healthy one, hack or no hack.

So we'd say the hack was the cleanest exit, not necessarily the only one. It is also the more entertaining story, which may be why Scorsese tells it so well. The real news, per TheWrap, is that he was apparently close to making it at all.

Epics rarely die of bad ideas; they die when belief runs out

The irony is delicious: Scorsese later appeared as himself in Rogen's Apple TV comedy The Studio, where Rogen plays a studio boss who derails a project the director is desperate to make. Reality, it seems, wrote the pitch first.

Our verdict: don't read this as gossip about Rogen. Read it as a reminder that the epics we mourn are rarely murdered by bad ideas. They die from accidents of timing, leaks and mood in a boardroom. Scorsese went on to make other films, and he joked that when it comes to the big Roman epic, he "missed it." Behind the joke, we think cinema is probably poorer for a Cleopatra we will never see. The next time a big film vanishes quietly, ask who stopped believing in it, and why, before blaming the script.