Anyone who’s been reading these pages over the last few days will know that Moneyball, which was due to be directed by Steven Soderbergh and star Brad Pitt, was thrown into turmoil on Friday when Sony Pictures put it in ‘limited turnaround’, even though it was supposed to start filming this Monday.
What that meant was that Soderbergh had three days to try and put the movie together with other backers as Sony was no longer willing to make it in its current form. However both Warner and Paramount have now passed on the film, presumably agreeing with Sony that spending $60 million on a film about baseball that doesn’t stick to the traditional sports movie narrative, was too risky. Baseball films have always been problematic as they don’t tend to be popular outside America and Japan, and with Soderbergh’s film concentrating on the statistics of making a winning team and featuring talking heads with real people, even the presence of Pitt hasn’t been enough to convince the studios.
It was apparently a late rewrite that pushed Sony head honcho Amy Pascal over the edge and into shutting the movie down and with Soderbergh unable to find financing elsewhere, the film’s only likely to go ahead now if Sony can either convince both Soderbergh and Pitt to go in a more mainstream direction (which isn’t likely), find a way slash the budget (which again would be difficult) or for the studio to get over their nerves and just go with it.
However, it’s looking like the most likely scenario now is that the film will just drop into limbo and never get made.