Instead of the film, Sorrentino will work on a second season of big-budget series The Young Pope, which has been a huge success in Italy, although viewing figures in the UK have been less impressive.
Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian film-maker who has made a career of movies focusing on the loneliness of ageing playboys with enormous power, is no longer working on a biopic of Silvio Berlusconi.
The series, which stars Jude Law and Diane Keaton, premieres in the US early next year.
The film, titled Loro, had been pencilled in to shoot next summer, but in a new interview, Sorrentino said: “[I]t is a complicated story and it is not always possible to do the film that you want to do.”