06.22.09 THEY PULLED THE PLUG ON MONEYBALL

A couple other places already had this, but the Brad Pitt movie that had all the stat nerds creaming into their graph paper has been laid to rest. Yep, Columbia Pictures has pulled the plug on Moneyball. From Variety (via Filmdrunk):

On Friday, Columbia Pictures topper Amy Pascal placed the picture into “limited turnaround,” giving the filmmaker the chance to set it up at another studio, with Warner Bros. and Paramount the prime targets.

The move came after Pascal read a rewrite that Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian’s script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed. Pascal was uncomfortable enough with how the vision had changed that she applied the brakes.

The studio had doubts that a $50 million movie about baseball narrated in an alinear fashion using former baseball players playing themselves. Sure, it doesn’t sound great when you put it that way, but I bet the movie had one helluva VORP. What’s a VORP again? That’s not a anatomical term, is it?