The head attached to the impossibly chiselled rig of Channing Tatum visited that bastion of pomp and tradition known as the MTV Movie Awards just the other day. After picking up the Trailblazer Award, given to a young actor with a body of work that is deemed diverse, and a public reputation that is transcendent (for the record, Tatum is about 11 years older than the award’s previous two recipients in Emma Stone and Emma Watson, but that’s neither here nor there) and somehow in the middle of all that excitement he’s managed to drop a tasty little titbit of information about the upcoming sequel to that gloriously sweaty, gyrational, glistening cinematic achievement known as Magic Mike.
The sequel, which we know will be titled Magic Mike XXL and has been penned from the godly hands of Tatum himself, is going to be a road movie. But maybe not in the traditional sense of previous films that fit that ilk. Speaking to MTV, Tatum hinted that he’s tried to blend the light and shade in the script, “We don’t want to make it some serious slice-of-life movie. We want to have real, like reality in it, but we don’t want to make like some dark drama. There was some darkness in the last movie and I think it surprised people and shocked people. This one, we want to have a lot of conflict and a lot of struggle, but we also want there to be a shit tonne of fun. A shit tonne of ridiculous stuff that you would never see in a movie, on the face of the earth, ever again.”
With regards to casting, though no deals have actually been signed on the dotted line as of yet, newly crowned Academy Award Winner Matthew McConaughey has had his character from the first film, Dallas, written into the second. And from Tatum’s attitude, it would appear that it’s merely a formality that Matty will keep L-I-V-I-N his way back into the super-sized sequel.
Filming for Magic Mike XXL begins at some unconfirmed point soon, putting a speculative release date at somewhere in the early stages of 2015. But until then, here’s this:
Photo: Christopher Polk via Getty Images.
