Martin Scorsese Says Seth Rogen and the Sony Hack “Ruined” His CLEOPATRA Movie With Angelina Jolie

Martin Scorsese nearly made a Cleopatra movie starring Angelina Jolie, and according to the legendary filmmaker, we can blame Seth Rogen and the infamous Sony hack for killing it.

During the first episode of Tribeca's original series Crafty, Scorsese opened up about the abandoned project and how the fallout from Rogen's controversial 2014 comedy The Interview derailed his plans.

“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,” Scorsese said. “Seth Rogen, right? And then he got mad, and [it] ruined Cleopatra.”

For anyone who needs a refresher, The Interview starred Rogen and James Franco in a comedy about two Americans recruited to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In November 2014, Sony Pictures was hit by a massive cyberattack carried out by hackers who wanted to prevent the film's release. The attack exposed thousands of private emails, internal documents, and embarrassing conversations between Hollywood executives.

Among the leaked messages were emails from producer Scott Rudin to then-Sony executive Amy Pascal, including one in which Rudin described Jolie as “a minimally talented spoiled brat.”

The resulting controversy created a massive headache for Sony, and Scorsese says his planned Cleopatra film became one of the casualties.

“We were gonna do it,” Scorsese also said. “Angelina Jolie. We were going. She was gonna be Cleopatra VII. It was gonna be really wild.”

The film was being developed with a screenplay by Eric Roth, who later wrote Scorsese's 2023 crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon.

The movie was part romance epic and part “political thriller with assassinations and sex,” according to the movie’s original screenwriter Brian Helgeland. He said: “It had elements of a political thriller with assassinations and sex, but it’s an epic that’s divided between her love affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony. Lots of true events surprised me when I was writing it.”

While Rogen obviously wasn't personally responsible for canceling Cleopatra, Scorsese's recollection makes it sound like the Sony hack brought an abrupt end to a project that was moving forward.

Scorsese spent his career exploring powerful, complicated people, and it's easy to imagine a fascinating historical epic that could have been unlike the usual Hollywood treatment of the Egyptian ruler.

Unfortunately, we'll probably never know exactly what Scorsese had planned. Still, it's crazy to think that a comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un may have helped prevent Martin Scorsese and Angelina Jolie from bringing Cleopatra to the big screen.