Film has certainly explored the female side of the world of stripping, but rarely has the glittered curtain been pulled back on the male side of this risqué form of entertainment. Director Steven Soderbergh paints this picture with his signature style and does so in a way that shows us the highs and lows of living a cash-only lifestyle, the sort that can seem like one big party, but one that leaves you questioning your future when the sun comes up, the high from the night before wears off, and you realize you have nothing more than a stack of ones to show for your “day at the office.” Magic Mike focuses on Mike (Channing Tatum), a man with a plan who is a natural hustler, bouncing from odd job to odd job, saving his cash, and working on his plan to start his own custom furniture business. Mike is a charmer, not just with the ladies, but with anyone he meets thanks to an unflappable, positive outlook on life as he good-humoredly chuckles in the face of even the most outlandish of situations he finds himself in. But Mike is not some good-looking blockhead, he knows where his strengths lie and has parlayed that into a successful run at a male revue, Xquisite, where he is “second in command” to the club’s owner, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey.) Mike is constantly watching the bottom line and while he is certainly having a good time, he considers it all a temporary stop

This is not exactly what I expected from the first trailer for Steven Soderbergh‘s next film, Magic Mike, the hot dude-starring film about male strippers that old Sods apparently feels pretty passionate about. Despite a generally interesting and talented cast (Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Matt Bomer, Matthew McConaughey, Joe Manganiello, and Wendi McLendon-Covey, amongst many others) and the promise of unwrapping some true-life stripper tales (Tatum himself once worked as one), Magic Mike looks like…a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy? Record scratch. Long billed as a film about the dirty/funny insides of male stripping through the lens of a new stripper (presumably Pettyfer) learning the ropes from a more experienced co-worker (Tatum), this first trailer focuses solely on Tatum, his burgeoning romance with Pettyfer’s sister (Cody Horn), and his overwhelming desire to get out of the stripping game so that he can make his own furniture – all set to the dulcet sounds of a Rihanna jam. What?

So that one guy from that one show is going to be playing The Man of Steel, and it’s big news. However, since we live in a beautiful age of information, we can also daydream about the movies that might have been if only that one other guy had been cast instead. In the case of the new Superman, Henry Cavill is taking on the tights, which happens to leave four other actors back out looking for work. Who are they, and would it have mattered who got the job?