Baseball film Moneyball has become one of those projects that just can’t seem to escape development limbo, floating between directors and writers with only Brad Pitt and Sony’s interest keeping it from disappearing altogether. But now there’s a new wrinkle – Jonah Hill is jumping aboard.
Hill is replacing Taking Woodstock’s Demetri Martin, who has been attached since the movie’s early days, but isn’t, we must assume the sort of marquee name that has the studio excited to keep funding it. You know they’re desperate when Brad Pitt hanging around isn’t enough to get the thing into production.
Based on Michael Lewis' book about a baseball manager who used statistics to build a trophy-scooping team on a limited budget, it was originally under the care of Marley & Me’s David Frankel. The script then passed to Steven Soderbergh, who brought on Pitt and took it in a documentary-style direction. But neither the studio nor the sport’s ruling body liked that vision and Soderbergh bailed.
Currently, Capote’s Bennett Miller is in the director’s chair, with Aaron Sorkin delivering several new drafts of the script, none of which have gotten Pitt’s seal of approval (We wonder if he’s being overly picky, given Sorkin’s screenplay pedigree and the fact that he just worked with Pitt pal David Fincher).
Whether it eventually scores a green light is anyone’s guess, but it’s certainly not headed for our screens anytime soon.