You may recall that a couple of months ago, Sony pulled the plug on Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball, just a few days before production was due to begin of the Brad Pitt starring flick. The studio was concerned with the direction the script had taken, with Soderbergh bringing in more documentary and technical elements to the story of the system the Oakland A baseball team used to turn the struggling team into champions.
While the book the film is based on is full of statistics and technical information on how the system worked, Sony were hoping for a more traditional underdog story, especially if they were paying $60 million to make it. After a few tumultuous days where Soderbergh tried to get another studio to pick up his vision, he left the project, and the film went back to the pre-greenlight phase at Sony. Initially it seemed like the entire film was going to die there, but shortly afterwards Sony brought in Aaron Sorkin to rework the script, and they’re now shopping around for directors.
THR reports that star Brad Pitt, studio execs and producers have met with several directors over the last week, and that two of the names that are in the running are Oscar nominated Captore helmer, Bennett Miller, and the increasingly ubiquitous Marc Webb, who scored a breakout hit this year with (500) Days Of Summer and since then has become atached to everything from a remake of Jesus Christ Superstar, to an American version of the Danish thriller, Just Another Love Story.
Apparently with all the money they’ve already spent on pre-production, the studio is hoping to get the film into production as soon as possible, and so is looking at director who don’t currently have something on the verge of being shot (indeed some have hinted that at this stage Sony and only going ahead with Moneyball for purely economic reasons, as they’ve spent tens of millions developing the film and would have to pay Brad Pitt whether the movie was made or not, so it actually makes more financial sense to make some sort of Moneyball film than to drop the project entirely). While no director has been signed up yet, expect somebody to officially take the reins in the next few weeks.