Martin Scorsese Says the Sony Hack Ended His ‘Cleopatra’ Film

Martin Scorsese has revealed that a planned Cleopatra film starring Angelina Jolie was ready to move forward before the 2014 Sony Pictures hack disrupted the project.

The director discussed the abandoned movie during a conversation with his daughter, Francesca Scorsese, for Tribeca’s Crafty. He said the script was prepared, Jolie was set to play Cleopatra VII and the production was intended to be an unusually bold interpretation of the Egyptian ruler’s story.

Scorsese connects the project’s collapse to ‘The Interview’

Scorsese traced the film’s fate to the enormous fallout surrounding The Interview, the 2014 comedy directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The movie’s fictional plot involved an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and its release became central to the controversy around the Sony cyberattack.

In Scorsese’s telling, the breach and the crisis that followed derailed work across the studio and brought his Cleopatra plans to an end. He jokingly placed the blame on Rogen while explaining that the disruption “ruined everything” for a project that had already reached the script stage.

The remarks offer a rare look at a major studio film that never reached production. A Scorsese-Jolie collaboration built around Cleopatra would have united one of American cinema’s most prominent directors with an Oscar-winning star in a historical epic. His description suggests the concept had moved beyond a casual pitch, even though casting, financing and a production schedule were never publicly finalized.

A lost project with an unexpected Hollywood afterlife

Scorsese and Rogen have since turned that history into something closer to an inside joke. Scorsese appeared as himself in the debut episode of Rogen’s Apple TV series The Studio, where a fictional studio executive becomes responsible for destroying the director’s passion project.

That appearance now reads as an especially pointed piece of Hollywood satire. More than a decade after the Sony breach, Scorsese’s account shows how a global cybersecurity crisis could erase a film before audiences ever saw a trailer, a cast announcement or even an official title card.