It’s been announbed that Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh is planning on adapting Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, Moneyball, for the big screen. The book tells the story of how the Oakland A’s manager, Billy Bean (which incidentally, is a fantastic name), used an unsual statistics system to build America’s cheapest and best baseball team.
Apparently Brad Pitt has already signed on to star as Beane, with the screenplay being written by Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs Of New York). Soderbergh has said he plans to animate the character of Bill James, the man who came up the system Bean used to build his team.
It’s budgeted around $57 million, which is quite a lot for a Soderbergh flick, and makes it seem like this should be one of his more commercial efforts. The only proviso is that its been suggested the script is quite like the book, and therefore full of statistics and maths, but let’s just hope they can chuck a decent plot in there as well.