Why would Sony pull the plug on a Steven Soderbergh film that was five days from filming after they’d already spent $10 million dollars on it? That’s been the question of the week. And now Deadspin has an exclusive peek at the script that caused Sony executives to cancel Moneyball. Their analysis: Soderbergh wanted it to be too real.
He also provided this handy disclaimer: “All that is to say an important portion of this film will be written in the editing room. This isn’t a cop-out; it’s just a fact, and entirely by design.” Not exactly the kind of stuff that inspires confidence in a script.
Maybe a buddy movie starring Brad Pitt and Demetri Martin was never in the cards. (Can you imagine them hanging out in real life?) Or perhaps, like Soderbergh says, baseball films have “virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.” It is surprising to note that A League of Their Own tops the baseball film box office with a gross of $107.5M. (Field of Dreams only took in $64 M in theaters.) Maybe he’s got a point.
Or maybe after a glut of box office downers, he wants to follow up The Informant! with something that will perform more like his Ocean’s franchise.