The Moneyball saga continues, with Variety confirming that Capote director Bennett Miller has been hired to take over from Steven Soderbergh on the sports movie, which has Brad Pitt slated to star. The movie, which is about how the management of the underperforming Oakland-A’s baseball team used a mathematical system to build a winning team for comparatively little money out of other team’s cast-offs, was due to be in the can already.
A few months ago Steven Soderbergh was literally days away from filming, when Sony, which had already geenlit the movie, cancelled shooting and demanded that more work be done on the script before it went before the camera. The problem was that Soderbergh was that the latest draft of the screeplay took things in a more arty direction, concentrating more on the maths and even wanting to include talking head interviews, rather than giving the studio the feel good underdog sport story they were hoping to get. While Soderbergh had a few days to set the picture up at another studio, he failed to do so and left the project.
While many expected that to be the end of Moneyball, Sony quickly hired scribe Aaron Sorkin to rewrite the script to their more mainstream specification, and as we reported a couple of weeks ago, the studio was in talks with the likes of Bennett Miller and (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb to help the movie. Now it seems Miller has got the job. While he’s still in negotiations, it seems these should be wrapped soon.
There’s no news when it might go into production though, and at the moment even a revised budget hasn’t been decided, although it’s likely to be downsized from when Soderbergh was attached (particularly as the cost was one of the reasons Sony got so jumpy about the director’s arty direction).