Martin Scorsese Says Seth Rogen 'Ruined' His Angelina Jolie 'Cleopatra'

Talking with his daughter on Tribeca's 'Crafty,' the director blamed the Sony hack over 'The Interview' for sinking his Jolie epic.

Martin Scorsese has a culprit for the Angelina Jolie epic he never got to shoot, and it's Seth Rogen.

In the first episode of Tribeca's new video series "Crafty," talking with his daughter, Francesca, the director traced the death of his "Cleopatra" back to the Sony hack. The hack came after Rogen's comedy "The Interview" made fun of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. When Francesca said she was mad about it, her father told her to take it up with Rogen, since the dictator "doesn't have a sense of humor," Deadline reported Friday.

It was a quip, mostly, but he made the pitch sound like a real loss: Jolie as Cleopatra VII, with a script by Eric Roth, who later wrote Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon." "It was gonna be really wild," Scorsese said, Variety reported.

The attack hit Sony's email in November 2014, carried out by a group that wanted the studio to shelve "The Interview," according to Variety. In the movie, James Franco plays a tabloid TV host and Rogen plays his producer, and the CIA recruits them to kill Kim. The FBI later concluded that North Korea's government ordered the hack, Entertainment Weekly noted.

The hack is also how the public found out what was going on with "Cleopatra" in the first place, and the leaked emails tell a messier story. In a batch Gawker obtained and E! News excerpted in December 2014, Scorsese first shows up as a consolation prize. Jolie had wanted David Fincher to direct. When producer Scott Rudin started talking to Fincher about a Steve Jobs movie instead, he floated Scorsese in March 2014 to cheer her up.

It worked. Jolie asked what she could do to help, "like getting on a plane and begging Marty," according to E!'s account. By May, E! reported from the same emails, Scorsese had turned out to be unavailable. By July, Rudin and Sony executive Amy Pascal were trying to talk Jolie out of Roth's script and into a version of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," E! wrote. She defended Roth's draft.

All of that happened months before anyone hacked anything. What the hack did was put those emails in public, including one in which Rudin called Jolie "a minimally talented spoiled brat," Variety recalled. Variety also said Rogen wasn't directly responsible for the project's collapse.

Scorsese doesn't seem to hold a grudge outside the joke. He played himself in the first episode of Rogen's Apple TV series "The Studio," where Rogen's studio chief, Matt Remick, hires him to make a Kool-Aid movie and then gets pushed to kill it, Entertainment Weekly recapped. Rogen has told EW that he hid a second camera crew in another room on that shoot, the crew from "Killers of the Flower Moon," in case Scorsese balked at the show's one-take style. Scorsese loved it, Rogen said. EW said it had asked Rogen's representatives about the "Cleopatra" remarks.

So Rogen has now killed two of his passion projects: one about Kool-Aid, which he killed on purpose as a fictional studio boss, and one about the last queen of Egypt, which got caught up in a joke about a dictator.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 31, 2026. Other sources: Variety, yahoo.com, eonline.com.