Chan­ning Tatum will make it rain in a third Mag­ic Mike film

Start sav­ing up those sin­gles, ladies and gen­tle­men, because the hottest show on Earth will soon be back and buffer than ever. The sin­gle great­est Hol­ly­wood fran­chise of this young mil­len­ni­um is get­ting a new and final chap­ter, by which we are of course refer­ring to the ongo­ing strip­per epic of Mag­ic Mike.

Dead­line ran an exclu­sive today announc­ing that star Chan­ning Tatum and direc­tor Steven Soder­bergh will return to the fab­u­lous­ly lucra­tive film series about a crew of good-natured dudes rov­ing around Amer­i­ca chang­ing lives by tak­ing their clothes off. Mag­ic Mike’s Last Dance will reunite the pair after Gre­go­ry Jacobs took over in the director’s chair for the unim­peach­able Mag­ic Mike XXL, this being Tatum’s first col­lab­o­ra­tion with Soder­bergh since 2017’s hill­bil­ly heist pic­ture Logan Lucky. (Fran­chise screen­writer Reid Car­olin will also return to the team.)

Though the pre­vi­ous install­ment had a rather explic­it­ly stat­ed ​“one last ride” vibe about it, this third piece of the tril­o­gy will more con­clu­sive­ly end the saga of Mike Lane, the small-time con­trac­tor moon­light­ing as rip­pling-abbed sex god for hordes of wor­ship­ful watch­ers. We can only hope that he’ll bring the old gang along with him: terse behe­moth Tarzan, clean-cut boy next door Ken, hulk­ing charmer Big Dick Ritchie, and chilled-out spir­i­tu­al­ist Tito.

In the Dead­line item, Tatum cap­tures the titan­ic grav­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion by announc­ing that ​“the strip­per­verse will nev­er be the same” once the cur­tain has been pulled back on this mas­ter­piece like so many tear-away pants. Soder­bergh shout­ed out the pop­u­lar tour­ing stage show based on the films in his com­ments: ​“As soon as I saw what Chan­ning, Reid, and the Mag­ic Mike chore­o­graph­ic team did with the live show, I said, ​‘We have to make anoth­er movie.’ Mike Lane’s dream of con­nect­ing peo­ple through dance must be realized.”

Now that Mike and the boys have plant­ed their flag on Myr­tle Beach’s pre­mier strip­ping con­ven­tion and the rest of the south­east­ern Unit­ed States with it, what’s left for this ensem­ble of beef­cakes? Half­time at the Super Bowl would be an okay place to start.