Columbia Pictures was scheduled to begin production on the Moneyball movie today with three months of preparation and a $50 million budget, but Variety reports that the studio stepped away from the Brad Pitt-Steven Soderbergh project at the last minute.
Moneyball has been placed into “limited turnaround,” which apparently means that other studios are now free to acquire the film’s rights. Variety speculates that Warner Brothers and Paramount could be interested, so we may still see Pitt portraying Billy Beane on the big screen.
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve always been skeptical about the Michael Lewis bestseller having the potential to be a big-budget movie and Variety notes that Columbia Pictures boss Amy Pascal “read a rewrite that Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian’s script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed,” so it’s possible that attempts to punch up the relatively action-less plot led to the studio balking.
Or maybe everyone just finally realized the possible insanity behind Soderbergh’s idea to use an animated Bill James as “this sort of oracle character that appears throughout and declaims various issues.”
