Hollywood’s curious determination to remake the movie that almost killed one of its biggest studios
From the outside looking in, a movie that went vastly over its agreed shooting schedule and soared so high above its original budget that it almost killed one of the biggest studios in Hollywood is hardly crying out for a remake, and yet some of the industry’s biggest names have all thrown their hat into the ring at various points to make it happen.
It’s a list that numbers Academy Award winners, renowned auteurs, A-list superstars, the director of Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return, and more than one veteran of superhero cinema. It hasn’t come around quite yet, but as the wheels of inevitability continue to turn, it’s surely only a matter of time before somebody – no matter who it is – gets their own reimagined version of Cleopatra off the ground.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s lavish historical epic may have landed nine Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and won four prizes for its technical merits, but it didn’t turn a single penny of profit until the syndication rights were sold in March 1966, almost three years after its theatrical debut. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, but it was also the most expensive ever made at the time, with the $44million production budget roughly equivalent to over $310m when adjusted for inflation.
Cleopatra came perilously close to bankrupting Warner Bros altogether, and it goes without saying that opulent recreations of the ancient past haven’t become any cheaper to make, even with the advent of digital effects. And yet, the desperation to remake the classic continues apace, with Denis Villeneuve the latest to single it out as one of his proposed future projects.
The Dune architect confirmed that 1917‘s Krysty Wilson-Cairns is currently writing a new version of the draft initially penned by Napoleon‘s David Scarpa, which is admittedly decent pedigree. Of course, Villeneuve is hardly the first director familiar with big budgets and extravagant epics to take a crack at Cleopatra, and there are no guarantees it’ll even happen, considering his jam-packed upcoming schedule.
David Fincher was planning on making it over a decade ago with Angelina Jolie in the title role, which screenwriter Brian Helgeland revealed “had elements of a political thriller with assassinations and sex” in an interview with Inverse, but also described it as “an epic that’s divided between her love affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony.” When that fell apart, things went quiet for a while before Cleopatra once again sprang into life.
In October 2020, it was announced that Wonder Woman duo Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot would be the new creative team steering the ship, only for the Monster director to drop out over a year later to be replaced by the aforementioned Children of the Corn sequel’s Kari Skogland, herself no stranger to superheroes having helmed Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
As recently as the summer of 2023, Gadot said she was “so passionate to tell her story and to bring justice to this character and her legacy, and celebrate her and her legacy.” Laeta Kalogridis was writing her version, which means it isn’t the same one as Villeneuve’s, and yet neither party seems to have mentioned the other.
That means there are technically two competing Cleopatra movies in the works, but it remains to be seen which one – if any – gets into production first. Looking at what happened last time, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest the risk greatly outweighs the reward, especially when historical epics are far from being guaranteed hits these days.
