Steven Soderbergh to Direct Male-Stripper Film MAGIC MIKE Starring and Inspired By Channing Tatum

You may ask yourself, “What would it take to prolong Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from directing?” The answer, apparently, is a movie about male strippers. The Ocean’s Eleven director just committed to helm Magic Mike, starring Channing Tatum. The film is based on Tatum’s experiences as a 19-year-old stripper, and tells “a story of friendship set in the world of male strippers.” Here’s what the director had to say about the project:

“When Channing talked to me about this, I thought it was one of the best ideas I’d ever heard for a movie. I said I wanted in immediately. It’s sexy, funny and shocking. We’re using Saturday Night Fever as our model, so hopefully we’re on the right track.”

Soderbergh has long talked about retiring after filming his Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas, and this doesn’t seem to change things much. Deadline reports that he will squeeze Magic Mike in this fall before he shoots his last two fllms. Hit the jump to see what Tatum has to say about the project, as well as a rundown of Soderbergh’s final films before he heads into retirement.

Speaking about the project, Tatum seemed rather exuberant, stating “This was a wild and pivotal time in my life and I couldn’t be more thrilled to go down the rabbit hole with Steven.” The actor’s apparently been trying to get the project off the ground for a while, and it looks like he finally found the right director with enough gusto to go for it. The project is expeceted to be fairly low-budget (something Soderbergh does well), but not to the microbudget extent that Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experiment was.

So at this point, the schedule for Soderbergh’s final films looks like this: Haywire starring Tatum, Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender his theaters this August, filming on Magic Mike is set to start in September/October, the star-studded Contagion (Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, etc.) is slated for October 21^st, then The Playlist reports that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. starring George Clooney is aiming to shoot in February of next year, with the Liberace biopic starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon serving as Soderbergh’s grand finale, set to film next summer.