magical mike has earned its bones at the box office by promising viewers a dirty good fun time with some smooth-dancing, burly male specimens. But now the threequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance hitting theaters soon, how much dirt should viewers prepare for?
Funnily enough, instead of trying to tease fans with exciting banter about what Channing Tatum and his co-stars are up to, magical mike series creator and original film director Steven Soderbergh actually lets you know Magic Mike 3 is actually on the cleaner side of things.
During a recent interview promoting the magical mike threequel, Soderbergh was careful to distinguish selling sex from selling “sexy”:
“For me it’s about sexy. It’s not necessarily about the sex and whether the movie is explicit. There’s no nudity in it [my 1998 film] ‘Out of sight.’ There’s no nudity in ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance.’ There’s not even a thong,” Soderbergh explained Rolling stone. “And yet our desire was to make a sexy movie.”
“What’s sexy is intimacy and genuine emotion,” added the filmmaker. “Something that feels alive and electric and can be vulnerable. That can be sexy. You let someone into your heart, and that’s scary. You can get hurt.”
Steven Soderbergh, age 60, definitely has a different view on relationships than he did when he was in his mid-20s when he broke through with a movie like Sex, lies and videotape (1989). Soderbergh also acknowledges that when he explains where his interests in sex and relationships now lie:
“The most radical thing you can do right now I think, as opposed to showing the beginning of the relationship when there’s all this heat and light because of the attraction – that’s easy – is to show people who are already 20 been married years. years for whom that’s still true. Where you don’t even make a big deal out of it. They’ve been together for 20 years and they still love each other that way.”
Magic Mike’s Last Dance certainly felt like a much more mature affair; the marketing has completely focused on Tatum’s Mike and his steamy dances with wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault). That relationship seems to be central to this chapter, making it very different from the series that preceded it.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance will hit theaters on February 10.
