Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike XXL” launches production

PanARMENIAN.Net - A hot title of next summer's slate began production: Magic Mike XXL, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

Steven Soderbergh, who helmed the original male stripper flick penned by Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin, tweeted a shot of the sequel's clapperboard on Sunday, August 31 adding, "It's ON!" While he's passed the director's torch to his oft-collaborator Gregory Jacobs (who was Soderbergh's first assistant director on Side Effects, Behind the Candelabra and the Ocean's films, among other films), he has signed on as XXL's director of photography, camera operator and film editor.

"He worked as a producer on the [2012] movie and has been Steven's right-hand man for almost 25 movies," Tatum, who also stars in the second film, told The Hollywood Reporter last summer of Jacobs' lead on XXL. But Tatum admitted that it would be intimidating to have Soderbergh behind the camera. "He is such an opinionated and talented man, if he wants to do a five-minute tracking shot through a forest, you don't want to doubt him. It would be like having sex with your girlfriend while her porn-star ex-boyfriend is in the room watching you."

Soderbergh — who shoots under his cinematographer alter ego Peter Andrews and edits under pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard — was happy to give up his director's chair for the sequel. "I want to be there, but I don't want to be the director," Soderbergh explained in GQ's June cover story. "I want to be a part of it. I want to be in the band, but I just don't want to be the frontman this time."