Scorsese says Sony hack “ruined” planned Jolie Cleopatra film

By Daniel Okafor

Martin Scorsese said Sony’s November 2014 email hack (unauthorized access to the company’s correspondence) derailed a planned Cleopatra starring Angelina Jolie, blaming the fallout from Seth Rogen’s The Interview for ending the project.

The claim appeared in the first episode of Tribeca’s original series Crafty. Scorsese traced the film’s fate to the controversy over The Interview, a comedy built around a fictional assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

How did The Interview reach Cleopatra?

“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.”

His account compresses the story into several steps, though it leaves the production mechanics largely unstated. No film arrived. Scorsese said the project was nixed after the attack on Sony’s email system.

The Crafty episode dates the breach to November 2014. A group responsible for the intrusion hoped The Interview would not be released by Sony. The hack exposed thousands of emails and placed internal correspondence at the center of the industry dispute.

The account places Rogen inside the chain of events but not at the point of cancellation. It explicitly notes that Rogen was not directly responsible for Cleopatra being canceled.

What did Jolie’s planned role look like?

“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 project had a named screenwriter. The account identifies Eric Roth as the writer. Roth later wrote Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon.

Those surviving details sharpen the outline. Jolie was to play Cleopatra VII, and Roth was to write the project under Scorsese. The plan was concrete, even if its future was not. The account gives no release date or further cast.

What survived the hack?

The leaked correspondence added a sharper edge. Among thousands of exposed emails were messages from producer Scott Rudin to Sony’s Amy Pascal calling Jolie “a minimally talented spoiled brat.”

That remark came from the leaked exchange. Scorsese’s own account of the abandoned production focused instead on the escalating dispute around The Interview and the Sony hack.

Keep the two claims separate. The leak supplied the embarrassing evidence, while Scorsese supplied the larger, more improbable causal story. His version plays less like a production chronology than a chain reaction with one very expensive fuse.

Scorsese’s wording links Rogen, Kim Jong Un’s anger and the reference to Columbia in one compressed sequence. The account does not place Rogen in charge of the attack or the cancellation decision.

Yet the project still disappeared. The central claim is that the 2014 breach and its industry aftereffects ruined the project, even though the account stops short of making Rogen directly responsible for the cancellation.

What happens to the abandoned film?

Any future revival would have to address the outline Scorsese has now made public: Jolie as Cleopatra VII, Roth as screenwriter and the alleged chain from The Interview to the Sony hack. The leaked Rudin correspondence would remain part of the story, whether or not anyone revives the project.

For now, Cleopatra remains a project described with unusual precision and without a finished film. The screenwriter, star and grievance are documented. The film is not.