Variety‘s Michael Fleming and Elsa Keslassy are reporting with apparent seriousness that Steven Soderbergh intends to direct a $30 million 3-D rock musical about Cleopatra with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the title role and Hugh Jackman as Marc Antony.
Financing and distribution deals are being shopped “over the next two weeks” by producers Greg Jacobs and Casey Silver. (Some kind of drop-dead, do-or-die window of opportunity?) The music has been written by the defunct indie rock band Guided by Voices (formed in ’83, disbanded in ’04), and the script is by James Greer, a former bass player for the band and an author.
It seems a bit much, no? Domestic Bollywood, emotionally excessive, flirting with ick. Maybe that’s the “point.” The gaudier and more Technicolor 3-D lurid in a take-no-prisoners sense, the better.