Moneyball is set to go again, with Deadline reporting that Sony is locking in a July start date for shooting. You may remember that the film already had a start date last year, with Steven Soderbergh directing, but the whole thing fell apart with only days to go before everyone, including star Brad Pitt, was due to turn up on set.
The movie, based on Michael Lewis non-fiction book, 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. The film version was all ready to go, but Sony, which had already geenlit the movie, cancelled shooting last year and demanded that more work be done on the script before it went before the camera.
The problem 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 a couple of months later got Capote helmer Bennett Miller on-board as the new director. Pitt is still set to star the film, although he apparently took a pay cut compared to the Soderbergh version, as did most other people, so Sony could cut the budget from around $60 million to $47 million. The only other cast member locked so-far is Jonah Hill, although with a start date now set, Miller is getting ready to start fill the other roles.