So “Moneyball,” Steven Soderbergh’s baseball metrics drama starring Brad Pitt and Demetri Martin was killed last minute by Sony chief Amy Pascal. Apparently she didn’t like Soderbergh’s rewrite draft and pulled the plug (some have suggested that Pitt is the culprit, and she was simply the beard, though David Poland seemed to back away from that assertion late last night).
The film was thrown into “limited turnaround” to potentially find a new home and the bigger players of interest were evidently Paramount and Warner Bros.
What shouldn’t be a shock to anyone: apparently both studios have passed according to the L.A. Times. Paramount was a no-brainer there, after Friday. WB was probably the project’s only Obi-Wan-Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Both evidently “shared concerns about the film’s high budget and limited commercial appeal.” Again, no shocker. It’s sharp, but unconventional script with no apparent villains, romance interests, etc., the things normal audiences look for and with a $57 million dollar budget, this was supposed to be a “normal audiences” picture.
Smaller scale, it definitely could be a “Steven Soderbergh picture,” but that’s not what Sony was looking for especially with marquee name Brad Pitt involved. Apparently Pascal “disagreed over Soderbergh’s plan to shoot the film in a more improvisational documentary style.”
Sony are now looking at options. 1) Convince Soderbergh to make it more mainstream, 2) drop him and choose another director or 3) kill it all together. Things are not looking good for it, frankly.
