Brad Pitt’s baseball film strikes out before first inning due to scriptwriting rows
Brad Pitt
How can the world’s sexiest man not open a movie? Brad Pitt was days away from filming Steven Soderbergh’s $50m baseball epic Moneyball when Columbia Studio head Amy Pascal pulled the plug. Citing that the script, by Steven Zallian and recently rewritten by Soderbergh, was not what Pascal had originally agreed to, Soderbergh has permission to find another studio with which to play ball.
Pitt, voted sexiest man alive since 1998, couldn’t have a stronger public presence: he’s one half of Brangelina, arguably the most caring celebrity couple on the globe. Dig a little deeper, however, and this upset indicates yet another cry from within Hollywood’s survival struggle. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pitt’s most recent big film, had an estimated budget of $150m. Normal marketing costs typically add that figure again. Benjamin Button had the snot marketed out of it in a way that most films don’t. If promotional costs were higher than $150m – which is not a stretch – the film’s current global box office take of $333 (approximate) means it may not have broken even. That’s bad juju.
The Cohen brothers’ Burn After Reading (budget $37m) brought in $60m, which seems reasonable until marketing costs are considered. Andrew Dominick’s Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? An estimated budget of $30m and box office takings of $3m – and no, that is not a typo. Of course, Taratino’s Inglorious Basterds has yet to make its mark, but given it too is American art-house, in all probability the figures won’t be enough to beguile studio heads into saying, “Yes, let’s do that baseball move!” After all, Soderbergh’s last film, Che: Part Two, had an estimated budget of $40m, took $1.5m. You’d have to go back to Ocean’s Thirteen, budget estimated at $85m with box office of $117m to see that there’s definitely trouble at ‘mill.
This is not to say that either Pitt’s or Soderbergh’s career is in dire straits – or that Moneyball won’t get made by someone somewhere. With the last minute decision to stop a film literally days from production, damage limitation makes sense. If you were a studio head facing a film that “doesn’t follow the traditional narrative structure of most sports yarns”, you know the difference between the sound of cash registers and alarm bells.
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