Selena Gomez joins Brady Corbet's four-hour The Origin of the World
selena gomez is joining Brady Corbet’s fourth feature, The Origin of the World, alongside Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. The project is being mounted as a four-hour film with a 200-page script and a shoot planned for this summer in Portugal and South Africa.
Cate Blanchett at Cannes
Cate Blanchett brought the project into public view during a masterclass at Cannes, and the cast report followed soon after. Corbet is building the film around an explicitly body-centered premise, describing it as “X-rated” and “genre-defying,” while also saying it is not a horror film.
The scale is unusual even by prestige-drama standards. Corbet said the story spans 150 years, with the primary narrative anchored in the 1970s, and it also moves through American mysticism, the history of the occult, and immigration from China to California.
Mitch Horowitz and 65mm
Corbet is working with occult historian Mitch Horowitz, a clue that the film’s historical and metaphysical material is being treated as research, not decoration. Andrew Morrison will produce under the Kaplan Morrison banner, and the production plans to use ultra-rare 8-perf 65mm cameras over 50 days.
That combination points to a film that is expensive in ambition even without a distributor attached yet. Corbet’s previous title, The Brutalist, drew awards attention after being shot for just $10 million, but this new project is being set up on a far broader canvas and with a runtime that lands at four hours.
Black Bag pairing
Fassbender and Blanchett previously starred together in Black Bag in 2025, giving Corbet two leads with an existing on-screen history. Selena Gomez arrives after her turn in Emilia Perez, and the cast now gives The Origin of the World a commercial profile that should make distribution negotiations harder to ignore.
The practical takeaway is simple: this is no small-canvas prestige title. A 200-page script, a four-hour runtime, and location work in two countries make The Origin of the World the sort of production buyers tend to watch closely before they commit, and the distributor decision is the one piece that will tell the market how far Corbet can push it.
