Selena Gomez is joining Brady Corbet’s next film, The Origin of the World, a sprawling new project that will also star Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. The cast became clear after Blanchett mentioned the film during a masterclass at Cannes, before trade publications confirmed the full lineup.
Corbet has described the film as “X-rated” and “genre-defying,” and said it is explicitly centered on the body, but not a horror film. The story reportedly stretches across 150 years, from the 19th century to the present, with the main narrative anchored in the 1970s.
That scale helps explain why the project is drawing attention now. The script runs 200 pages, the projected runtime is four hours, and principal photography is planned for this summer, with a 50-day shoot in Portugal and South Africa using ultra-rare eight-perf 65mm cameras. Andrew Morrison is producing under the Kaplan Morrison banner, and no distributor is attached yet.
The film’s backbone is American mysticism and the history of the occult, with Corbet working alongside occult historian Mitch Horowitz. It will also explore immigration from China to California, adding another historical thread to a narrative that aims to move across eras rather than sit inside one.
There is also a notable reunion in the cast. Fassbender and Blanchett last appeared together in Black Bag in 2025, while Gomez comes to the project after Emilia Perez in 2025. The combination gives Corbet a sharply recognizable ensemble for a film that is already being framed as one of his most ambitious.
That ambition fits the director’s recent trajectory. His previous film, The Brutalist, earned 10 Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe, despite being made for $10 million after years of development hurdles. The Origin of the World is being described as a larger, stranger follow-up, and the lack of a distributor means the project is still in the setting-up stage even as its cast and scope come into focus.
The immediate question is not whether Corbet is thinking big. He is. It is whether a four-hour, historically layered, occult-tinged film in eight-perf 65mm can be mounted on the schedule he has outlined and still reach audiences in the form he appears to want.
