The Phoenician Scheme stars Benicio Del Toro as wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda who appoints his only daughter, a nun, as sole heir to his estate. As Korda embarks on a new enterprise, they soon become the target of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists, and determined assassins. The Movie also stars:
- Mia Threapleton
- Michael Cera
- Riz Ahmed
- Tom Hanks
- Bryan Cranston
- Mathieu Amalric
- Richard Ayoade
- Jeffrey Wright
- Richard Ayoade
- Scarlett Johansson
- Benedict Cumberbatch
- Rupert Friend
- Hope Davis
The Phoenician Scheme was produced, written and directed by Wes Anderson from a story he conceived with Roman Coppola. The Phoenician Scheme had its world premiere in the main competition of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2025 and was released theatrically in the United States by Focus Features on Friday May 30, and in Germany by Universal Pictures on June 29, 2025.
From The BBC Article by Emma Jones May 21, 2025:
One of the trademarks of a Wes Anderson film is the guaranteed tranche of famous faces that always appear. But the charismatic actor set to be the biggest talking point in Anderson’s latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme, is practically unknown. Twenty-four-year-old Mia Threapleton, whose mother is the actor Kate Winslet, has been described by critics as “sensational” in her first leading role, following the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week.
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Threapleton plays Liesl, a red-lipped, pipe-smoking, alcohol-drinking noviciate nun, whose withering put-downs turn her father Zsa Zsa Korda, a wealthy tycoon embarking on a questionable multi-national infrastructure project (aka “The Phoenician Scheme”), into putty. She is ordered out of her convent to go on a trip with him, as he tries to groom her, comedy Don Corleone-style, for the family business.
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An exploration of a family dynamic is hardly a departure for this director, but Anderson says that he and Coppola had been planning something quite different for the story. They were, he says, intending on writing something “very dark” about an industrialist who “is not really concerned with how the big decisions he has empowered himself to make for the world, are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes.”
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“Originally what I thought we would make was about a guy who refuses to be killed, who refuses to die even when he does die, and that he’s gathering people, resources, minerals, great possessions and money and none of it is having any effect on him,” Anderson tells the BBC. “It was going to be about someone who learns a lot and changes zero. But that wasn’t what we ended up writing at all.” By the end of the first scene, he adds, they’d gone into “a vision, a biblical motif” which gives the film a black-and-white subplot of Korda’s judgement in heaven, presided over by Bill Murray as God. But the heart of the film became the father-daughter love story Threapleton and del Toro enact.
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“I think if I didn’t have a nine-year-old daughter, this character Korda probably wouldn’t have a daughter,” Anderson confesses. “There’s also an inspiration for the character from my father-in-law (the late Lebanese construction entrepreneur Fouad Mikhael Malouf) and I observed the relationship between him and my wife. So parts of my life went into this one. Roman Coppola has a daughter, Benicio has a daughter. It’s something that connected all of us and I think that’s how it got into the centre of the film.”
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The Phoenician Scheme was made in Babelsberg Studios in Germany; the cast and crew stayed together and shared mealtimes, which is standard practice on an Anderson set. Threapleton describes the experience as “the best summer camp ever”.
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“The idea of the circus, or the travelling acting troupe, that’s what I am drawn to and I like stories with that kind of atmosphere,” Anderson says. “There is an itinerant feel about the way I make films; we tend to make these stories in different countries, in different settings, and we bring our group to those places, and it’s always a big reunion when we start a new movie. Ultimately, I think the only true reason why we work this way is because I think it’s more fun and I like it more.”
Credit: Courtesy of TPS Productions/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
Credit: Courtesy of TPS Productions/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
Credit: Courtesy of TPS Productions/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.
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