Brad Pitt's Moneyball Axed!

The situation has to be pretty bad to shut down a film starring Brad Pitt, directed by Steven Soderberg, and $10 million already sunk into pre-production costs.

According to Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal, Moneyball, a film about legendary Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, was shut down days before filming due to unauthorized script changes.

That must have been one bad script!!!!

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker. But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for," said Pascal of the reworked screenplay originally written by Steve Zaillian. "He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh had changed the script so dramatically that every scene which did not occur in real life were removed or entirely rewritten!

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story."

We've noticed that studios like it when true stories are told through blatant fabrication!

Sony had no other choice but to shelve the film until they found a new director, which means that Pitt would likely bow out.

"We love this movie, we always have and we still want to make it," said the Sony honcho. "It's a completely innovative way to tell a baseball story. It's about wanting to believe in magic, which is what baseball is all about."

Spin. Spin.

[Image via WENN.]