Along with being one of the most inventive and sharpest cinematic minds alive, Steven Soderbergh has proven to be the ultimate workhorse in the last few years. Since his return from a brief retirement in the mid-2010s, you can count on Soderbergh to release a movie every year, whether in theaters or on streaming. Within the first three months of 2025, audiences have been blessed with a double dose of Soderbergh on the big screen, with his ghost story, Presence, releasing in January, and his cool and suave spy thriller, Black Bag, releasing in March. From the get-go, Soderbergh has remained hyperactive behind the camera and artistically curious, unafraid to take a swing with a new genre or formalist decision. One of his abandoned projects, Cleo, promised to be an audacious rock musical about Cleopatra starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Hugh Jackman, but the project never played a single note.

Steven Soderbergh’s 2020s Have Been Very Prolific

As a guest on the podcast WTF With Marc Maron in 2021, Steven Soderbergh quipped that he only makes “movies,” as opposed to “films,” nowadays. Citing the bifurcated Che biopic as his last proper “film” (he notoriously had an unpleasant experience filming the historical saga), the director, in his post-retirement phase, has shown more interest in making tight, fun genre movies instead of prestigious dramas with Oscar potential. In the early 2010s, Soderbergh’s dissatisfaction with Hollywood as a business caused him to become burnt out from directing, and his recent slate of films, including Unsane, No Sudden Move, and Kimi, represent the director working away from oppressive studio supervision and working off a small budget. Of course, he still opts to shoot movies on iPhones and set horror movies from the perspective of ghosts, so he’s not phoning it by any means.

One can interpret the failure to launch Cleo, a riff on the story of the Queen of Egypt, off the ground as further motivation for Soderbergh to walk away from this perilous industry. In 2008, Soderbergh was signed on to direct a film with a bonkers premise described as “a 3-D live-action rock ‘n’ roll musical about Cleopatra.” He eyed Catherine Zeta-Jones, who starred in Soderbergh’s Traffic and Ocean’s Twelve, to play the titular queen, and Hugh Jackman as Marc Antony. With music written by indie rock band Guided by Voices and a script by the band’s former bass player, James Greer, Cleo looked to fit in with Soderbergh’s other big swings, including Che and The Girlfriend Experience, starring adult film star Sasha Grey and released in theaters and on DVD simultaneously. “I’ve wanted to do a musical my whole career,” the director told Empire. Having brought something new and daring to multiple genres, including sci-fi, crime, horror, and black comedy, we would have fully embraced Soderbergh’s strange, postmodern take on a musical that would have preceded Hamilton‘s use of anachronistic tunes.

The Fallout of ‘Cleo’ Represents Steven Soderbergh’s Struggles in Hollywood

Once Jackman, who was likely busy fulfilling his duties as Wolverine, dropped out, Cleo‘s chances of becoming a finished product petered out. Around this time, Soderbergh also struggled to get Moneyball off the ground, a film that became critically adored and Oscar-nominated in 2011. Once he set his sights on directing Behind the Candelabra, the story of Liberace‘s perverse sexual affairs that aired on HBO (which was intended to be his farewell to feature filmmaking), Cleo slowly faded away, despite his and Zeta-Jones’ interest in bringing it to Broadway years later. Musicals have been a tough sell for Hollywood, so much so, that when they produce musicals, they try to hide that fact in the marketing. You can imagine the headache that transpires when anyone tries to reinvent the genre with a distinct touch that could alienate a mass audience. In an era when Hollywood began pivoting hard into relying on brands and IP, Soderbergh’s dream project was likely deemed too much of a risk. Based on the fiasco that was the 1963 production of the Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton epic, Cleopatra, the subject may have been viewed as poison for any studio.

Regardless of who was directing, it’s a shame we were teased by the prospect of a Catherine Zeta-Jones and Hugh Jackman-led musical without ever seeing the final product. Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for playing Velma Kelly in Chicago, was more than capable of matching Jackman’s experienced musical chops in film and the theater. For Steven Soderbergh, a director who continues to entertain us without breaking a sweat, Cleo could’ve been the inflection point in his career. Having grown weary of high-scale, big-budgeted movies, crafting a lavish musical could’ve broken him, or it could have inspired him to reach the status of a blockbuster auteur like Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan. Movie musicals require effortless panache for a director, making Soderbergh, who has mastered the slick execution of intricate set pieces in the Ocean’s trilogy, a viable candidate to reinvent the genre.