Director Martin Scorsese says he came close to shooting a large-scale film about Cleopatra with Angelina Jolie in the lead, but the project was scrapped amid the scandal surrounding Sony Pictures in 2014. He mentioned this in a conversation with his daughter Francesca for a series of talks released by the Tribeca Festival.
Seth Rogen made fun of Kim Jong Un, and he got angry and tore into everyone at Columbia. And then they ruined Cleopatra. We were going to make it, the script was ready. Angelina Jolie was going to be Cleopatra VII.
— Martin Scorsese
The reference is to events of 2014, when Sony was preparing to release the comedy The Interview, starring Seth Rogen, about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. In response, the company's servers came under a massive hacking attack, which resulted in internal correspondence and confidential documents being leaked online. The FBI blamed North Korea for the breach.
Among the published emails was correspondence between then co-chair of Sony Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin, who was working on the Cleopatra film. In one of the letters, Rudin called Angelina Jolie, the frontrunner for the role, a "spoiled brat with minimal talent." The project, based on a biography of the Egyptian queen by Stacy Schiff, had already been in trouble: director David Fincher had dropped out.
As Scorsese's words and the correspondence published at the time suggest, after Fincher's departure he was to take over the production. Judging by the letters, the director planned to cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis in other leading roles, who might have played Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. The project was never realized.
Letters