Sony Drops Pitt for Clooney?

Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty Images The Daily Beast’s Kim Masters wonders why the studio canned Brad Pitt’s Moneyball when it’s bankrolling a staggeringly expensive James L. Brooks comedy—and has just inked a production deal with the money-losing George Clooney.

With her last-minute cancellation of Moneyball, a film that was to star Brad Pitt with Steven Soderbergh directing, Sony Pictures chairman Amy Pascal fired a shot heard 'round Hollywood. But then came news that Pascal had made a production deal with George Clooney. Pitt, international box-office draw, is out and Clooney, who can’t seem to open a movie, is in? What gives?

Within days, the Moneyball decision was thoroughly picked over in the press and there was lots of bloggy speculation about the real motive. On the surface, the studio’s simple explanation seemed plausible: At the last minute, Soderbergh turned in a rewrite of Steve Zaillian’s script that left Pascal cold. “The draft he turned in wasn’t at all what we’d signed up for,” Pascal told the Los Angeles Times. “He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves...He wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.”

Pitt, international box-office draw, is out and Clooney, who can’t seem to open a movie, is in? What gives?

Given that much of Soderbergh’s recent work has been cerebral and often chilly, it’s easy to believe that his script lacked mass appeal. (Aside from Ocean’s Eleven to Thirteen, in recent years Soderbergh has directed a pile of money losers: Solaris, The Good German, Bubble, and the two-part Che.) Why entrust him with the better part of $60 million to make an idiosyncratic film about baseball, of all things—a topic that doesn’t draw well outside the U.S.?

But looking at the broader picture, it may be that Pascal’s decision to cancel Moneyball is not quite a sign that she’s signed on to the ever-more-stringent financial discipline in Hollywood. Even as Sony has suffered through big disappointments—The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Year One—and even as Pascal yanked the leash on Soderbergh, it’s much too late to do the same to one of her favorites, James L. Brooks. He’s already at work in Philadelphia on an untitled comedy that has a staggering budget, acknowledged to be $90 million and rumored to have passed $115 million.

This is as old-fashioned a deal as one can hope to find. It has a star-packed cast: Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, and—stepping in at the last minute for Bill Murray—the stunningly expensive Jack Nicholson. Not only is the budget enormous, but the talent is probably taking the sort of big share of the profit that seems so 2008 at this point.

And here’s a point of interest: Apparently the film is about a love triangle with Reese Witherspoon as a professional softball player and Owen Wilson as a former baseball pro. Sony Pictures wants you to know that this not—repeat, not—as baseball movie. It is a romantic comedy.

James L. Brooks is an American treasure, and if he had never done anything but bring The Simpsons to the screen, he would still deserve our worship. But here is another brilliant filmmaker who hasn’t directed a commercial film in years. (His last effort, Spanglish, was inexplicable.) And Brooks is famously slow and obsessive.