Tatum eyes directing ‘Magic Mike’

For “Magic Mike 2,” Channing Tatum might wind up performing tricks behind the camera.
The 33-year-old star says that a follow-up to his 2012 stripper tale is still in development, but they’ve run into a problem: “Magic Mike” director Steven Soderbergh isn’t really interested in directing another movie.
Unless Soderbergh can be convinced to return, it looks like Tatum might have to slide into that empty director’s chair.
“That’s sort of where we are at – either [my producing partner] Reid Carolin and I will direct it together, or we’ll have Greg Jacobs direct,” Tatum told The Hollywood Reporter. “He worked as a producer on [‘Magic Mike’] and has been Steven’s right-hand man for almost 25 movies. Right now, we’re just trying to clean up the story, and then we’ll make a decision.”
Yet stepping in for Soderbergh is not a decision an aspiring director like himself takes lightly, he added.
“It is hard for me and Reid to direct after one of the greatest directors of our time. Steven has argued [for us to do so]. He has said he would shoot it; he would DP it,” the actor went on. “And there’s another thing: Is that good? Because 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.”
As for the movie itself, Tatum’s envisioning something lighter than the first chaps-filled go-round.
“It will be a road-trip movie, and it will essentially be the movie that everyone thought the first one was going to be: crazy and fun and less slice-of-life and less drama,” he said. “The first one, we had to make not so cheesy and campy; this one we are going to swing for the fences.”