Focus Features Scoops Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Black Bag’ Starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender

January 25, 2024 @ 5:22 PM

Focus Features has won the auction for Steven Soderbergh spy thriller “Black Bag,” which has Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender attached to star, TheWrap has learned.

Steven Soderbergh is set to direct the film this summer in Europe, working from a script by David Koepp, according to an insider with knowledge of the project. Plot details about are otherwise being kept under wraps.

Producers on “Black Bag” are Casey Silver and Greg Jacobs.

This marks the second project this week that Soderbergh and Koepp have set up together, following the sale of their Sundance ghost story “Presence” to Neon.

Soderbergh said the idea for “Presence” actually came out of his insistence that first-person VR storytelling could never work.

“I had real questions about the choice that was at the center of this, because I’ve been very vocal about the fact that [first] person POV VR doesn’t work, is never going to work as a narrative,” Soderbergh said during a Q&A after the film’s premiere screening at the Library theater. “Nobody wants this thing on their head. They want to see a reverse angle of the protagonist with an emotion on their face experiencing the thing. I’ve been beating this drum for a long time – it’s never going to work.”

Soderbergh continued, “The only way to do it was you never turn around. It was really fun because there was no other plan. That’s it. You live or die by that.”

The deal for “Black Bag” was brokered by CAA and by Michael Sugar’s Sugar23.

Deadline first reported the news.