It’s tempting to say that this is Brad Pitt getting a taste of his own ‘dropping out of a project and killing it’ medicine, but the person really getting screwed here is Steven Soderbergh. See, Sony has dropped his baseball film, Moneyball.
It starts shooting tomorrow.
On Friday Sony’s Amy Powell struck the movie out when she read the latest script by Soderbergh and Steve Zaillian; apparently what they turned in was quite different from his original pitch to her and, even with Brad Pitt in the lead, Pascal got worried about Columbia’s 50 million dollars plus investment.
But again, the movie was supposed to start shooting tomorrow morning. Pascal gave the film a ‘limited turnaround,’ which means that Soderbergh and Pitt’s people were running around all weekend to see if any other studio wanted the project, but the last minute nature of the drop bodes exceptionally ill for the film.
Moneyball had already been worked on in a major way. In fact, Soderbergh had already been shooting – in this case he was doing interviews with real ballplayers, which would be interspersed throughout the movie. He had also done camera tests, probably had sets built and everybody involved was ready to go.
Could this be another entry in my semi-regular ‘Movies That Never Were’ column? It’s going to be a hectic couple of days for Moneyball.