How Seth Rogen caused the death of Martin Scorsese’s Cleopatra

The director reveals that his film project with Angelina Jolie was abandoned in the wake of Sony’s piracy in 2014, caused by the comedy The Interview That Kills! with Seth Rogen.

Did Seth Rogen kill the Cleopatra by Martin Scorsese?

In any case, this is the funny explanation given by the filmmaker about one of his major aborted projects. In the first episode of Craftyan original podcast from Tribeca, the director talks about how the Sony hack in November 2014 indirectly caused the abandonment of his film dedicated to the Queen of Egypt, with Angelina Jolie in the lead role.

At the time, the Sony studio was the victim of a cyberattack claimed by a group seeking to prevent the release of The Killer Interview!the comedy by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. This wacky prank recounted a fictional assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. An intrigue which angered Pyongyang and triggered a diplomatic crisis, before the hackers revealed thousands of internal Sony emails.

And this is where Martin Scorsese’s project would have been swept away in turmoil:

“We were going to do Cleopatra at some point. And then they laughed at Kim Jong-un, who got angry and blew up Columbia. It was Seth Rogen, right? And then Kim Jong-un got angry, and it killed Cleopatra!“

A rather graphic way of summarizing the consequences of this affair.

Because Seth Rogen is obviously not directly responsible for the cancellation of the film. But the hack notably revealed particularly embarrassing exchanges between producer Scott Rudin and Amy Pascal, then head of Sony Pictures. In one of these emails, Rudin referred to Angelina Jolie as “pretentious little pest with very limited talent.” An episode which certainly did not help relations between the different parties. Scorsese confirms in any case that the project was well advanced until this moment:

“We were really going to do it. Angelina Jolie was to play Cleopatra VII. That would have been completely crazy!”

The screenplay was to be written by Eric Roth, already a collaborator with Scorsese on Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. A missed opportunity to see the filmmaker tackle one of the most mythical figures of Antiquity, half a century after the legendary film starring Elizabeth Taylor.