(Credit: Universal Pictures)
Wed 10 December 2025 17:15, UK
Most filmmakers and producers would probably be thrilled to work with Angelina Jolie, since she’s not only one of Hollywood’s biggest and most famous stars, but has also become increasingly selective with her workload over the last decade.
However, one producer was borderline apoplectic at the prospect of collaborating with her. While they’d have definitely preferred their dirty laundry had remained un-aired in public, the silver lining, if you could even call it that, was that the movie that caused the friction between them was never made.
The way Hollywood tends to work is that expensive productions stand a greater chance of being given the green light if they’ve got some heavyweight talent attached on either side of the camera. As a certified A-lister, Jolie fit the bill, which still wasn’t enough to save her from a vicious tongue-lashing.
A new version of Cleopatra has been in the works for well over a decade at this point, and it’s no closer to getting in front of the cameras than it’s ever been. A previous iteration had Jolie attached to the title role, and David Fincher set to direct, which was enough to seriously piss off Sony’s Scott Rudin.
According to him, or to be more accurate, his leaked emails, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the actor tried to convince Fincher to drop out of his planned Steve Jobs biopic, which he eventually did, and hold back the start of shooting until she’d made her directorial debut on In the Land of Blood and Honey.
“I’m not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat who thought nothing of shoving this off her plate for 18 months so she could go direct a movie,” Rudin raged at his Sony cohort, Amy Pascal. “I have no desire to be making a movie with her, or anybody, that she runs and we don’t.”
Evidently, he wasn’t best pleased at Jolie trying to bend the film to her will, and he continued his character assassination. “There is no movie of Cleopatra to be made (and how that is a bad thing given the insanity and the rampaging ego of this spoiled woman, and the cost of this movie is beyond me),” he continued. “I have zero appetite for the indulgence of spoiled brats, and I will tell her this myself if you don’t.”
Needless to say, Rudin wasn’t thrilled with the slow development process, but he’d also have preferred it if those leaked emails hadn’t been made public. Still, he made his bed, and he was forced to lie in it, so it may have been a blessing that both Jolie and Fincher eventually dropped out of their Cleopatra, which saved him at least one incredibly awkward conversation.
It sounds like he was ready to pull the plug anyway, and it might be in his best interests if the pair avoided each other, should they ever find themselves attending the same event, lest things get even more tenuous.
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