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Rupert Murdoch announces Borat 2 - 'NOT'

By M&C Movie News Feb 9, 2007, 13:41 GMT

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch met the press on February 8 and let it be known that Fox was developing a sequel to Borat with Sacha Baron Cohen. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gestures while speaking during a plenary entitled 'Who Will Shape the Agenda', at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Friday, January 26, 2007. EPA/LAURENT GILLIERON

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation gestures while speaking during a plenary entitled 'Who Will Shape the Agenda', at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Friday, January 26, 2007. EPA/LAURENT GILLIERONBut by the time Murdoch realized that in fact a deal was not under consideraton, the news had spread across the news wires and the Internet.Cohen’s agency Endeavor was swamped with calls.A Fox spokesman said, "We're eager to work with Sacha again and we've had casual discussions about a sequel, which we'd love to do, but at this point it remains too preliminary to discuss."Borat cost about $18 million to make but has so far net more than $225 million worldwide.Murdoch’s comments were strange considering Borat’s success was praised but played down with no talk of a sequel a day earlier when News Corp announced quarterly earnings.Murdoch also made political comments announcing that he wanted to meet Senator Barack Obama, saying that Michael Bloomberg would make a good president while Hilary Clinton would not.Murdoch also refused to name an heir, said Internet was going to explode with over $3 billion in sales and that he will concentrate on India since China is such a tough market."China is vast, but China has not opened up yet. We keep a presence there. We're going to behave ourselves and be there until we see a change in policies. And it will have to come. It's a sovereign country, and that's the way they do things, and we'll just wait," he said.