Magic Mike first graced our screens in 2012 – the brainchild of star Channing Tatum, director Steven Soderbergh and his real-life experience working as a dancer when he was young. After bowing out of directing duties for the sequel Magic Mike XXLSoderbergh returns for the pair’s final boogie, Magic Mike’s Last Dance. Returning to the franchise for this third installment, charting the beginnings of a Magic Mike stage show, Soderbergh’s priority was to focus on what started it all: dance.
“We wanted to elevate the dance in a big way,” says the director the empire, offering an epic blowout sequence to wrap up Magic Mike’s trilogy. “We have this dance number with Channing and Salma [Hayek] Straight ahead. The last 30-plus minutes of the movie is just this giant dance sequence. A finale that posed all kinds of challenges for the legendary director. “My job is, how do I separate each of these? I can’t shoot them all the same way, I have to bring a different approach to each dance. It was really challenging. ” Fortunately, one South London theater had plenty of tricks up its shredding sleeves. “We’re performing all the sequences in this beautiful old theater, the Clapham Grand,” explains Soderbergh. “That was fun, there’s not a bad angle in that place…”
As the scale of the dance numbers increases, The Last Dance Mike finds himself in a committed partnership with Salma Hayek’s Max for the first time – a key dynamic of the threequel. “The first film was a very simple depiction of a group of characters existing in a specific environment that has not changed since its inception. The second film takes it a bit further to talk about what women are looking for on a night out where fantasies and sexuality are explored and how you still maintain a sense of mystery in an environment like that. Is permission and consent front and center?” Soderbergh explains. “The third movie dives into this in a big way, partly because we see Mike in a relationship for the first time. So it allows for a dynamic and a set of discussions that we didn’t have access to before. Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” If it was to be Mike’s last dance, it was set to be at least half an hour long.
Read more from the empireof Magic Mike’s Last Dance Story, speaking to director Steven Soderbergh, in the new Indiana Jones 5 The subject of the empire – on sale November 23rd, or pre-order a copy now. Magic Mike’s Last Dance Hitting theaters from February 10, 2023.
