Soderbergh, after announcing that he was ending his own career as a director of theatrical features in 2011 in order to focus on painting and non-cinema work - only to go on to direct several more films while “preparing” to retire and to ultimately direct, produce, edit, and shoot all 20 episodes of Cinemax’s The Knick - has returned to the director’s chair for Last Dance, and he also serves as director of photography and lead camera operator (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard).

The result is a collaboration between Soderbergh, Tatum, and screenwriter Reid Carolin that fictionalizes the origin story of a show that actually exists in real life. That’s where Soderbergh saw the production and “was just so knocked out that I wanted to glom onto what they had done,” he explains. Their revue opened at the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in 2017 and was an instant sensation in 2018, a revised version debuted in London’s Leicester Square.

So Soderbergh and Jacobs started developing a Magic Mike Broadway show about the character’s early years, which they paused in 2019 after key members of the team departed over “creative differences.” Meanwhile, Tatum and his regular co-choreographer and dance partner, Alison Faulk, had been developing a revue-style stage show (with no story or singing, just dancing), Magic Mike Live, inspired by the finale of the second movie, wherein Mike and the lads perform themed numbers at a strippers’ convention. Neither Tatum nor Soderbergh had any intention of revisiting the Magic Mike universe after the 2016 sequel, Magic Mike XXL, on which Soderbergh served as producer, cinematographer, lead cameraman, and editor (he left directorial duties to his longtime producer Gregory Jacobs).

In the third installment of the franchise, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, he’s back in the limelight after dramatically leaving it, this time in London, where he’s choreographing and starring in a theatrical revue financed by his beautiful patron-slash-lover (played by Salma Hayek, who, yes, dances with Tatum in two numbers). Soderbergh’s many heist pictures (the Ocean’s trilogy especially) are obvious examples, but the best may be the chronicles of Mike Lane, Channing Tatum’s self-effacing master of the bump-and-grind who can’t quit quitting the stage. Steven Soderbergh’s filmography is packed with stories of disaffected professionals who announce that they’re permanently out of whatever job they used to do yet reenter their fields instantly when offered a challenge too enticing to pass up.

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