Magic Mike Director Claims Last Dance Will Keep It Clean, While Keeping It Hot

Magic Mike has made its bones at the box office by promising viewers a dirty fun good time with some slick-dancing, hard-bodied male specimens. But now that the threequel, Magic Mike's Last Dance was dropping in theaters soon, how much dirt should viewers prepare themselves for? 

Funny enough, instead of trying to tease fans with titillating teases about what Channing Tatum and his co-stars may get up to, Magic Mike series creator and original film director Steven Soderbergh is actually letting it be known that Magic Mike 3 is actually on the cleaner side of things. 

While doing a recent interview promoting the Magic Mike threequel, Soderbergh was careful to differentiate selling sex, from selling "sexy": 

"To me, it's about sexy. It's not about the sex, per se, and whether the movie is explicit. There's no nudity in [my 1998 film] 'Out of Sight.' There's no nudity in 'Magic Mike's Last Dance.' There's not even a thong," Soderbergh explained to Rolling Stone. "And yet, it was our desire to make a sexy movie."

"What's sexy is intimacy and genuine emotion," the filmmaker added. "Something that feels alive, and electric, and has the potential for vulnerability. That can be sexy. You're letting somebody inside your heart, and that's scary. You can get hurt."

At sixty years old, Steven Soderbergh definitely has different views on relationships than he did in his mid-twenties when he broke onto the scene with a film like Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). Soderbergh acknowledges as much when explaining where his interests in sex and relationships now lie: 

"The really radical thing to do right now, it seems to me, 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've been married for 20 years for whom that's still true. Where you don't even make a big deal of it. They've been together for 20 years, and they're still into each other in that way."

Magic Mike's Last Dance has definitely felt like a much more mature affair; the marketing has put the focus squarely on Tatum's Mike and his steamy dances with wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault). That relationship seems to be at the center of this chapter, making it very different than the series that preceded it. 

Magic Mike's Last Dance will be in theaters on February 10th.