Moneyball's Deep-Sixed

Break out the baseball puns! Columbia has dropped Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball adaptation like an overvalued, arbitration-eligible pitcher after a career year. Why, it's as if producers made a running, 20-foot backhand flip to cut down the movie at the plate. Reports E! Online (which went with the decidedly weak "Columbia Drops the Ball on Brad Pitt's Moneyball" for its punning headline): They can't all be home runs for Brad Pitt. His latest project, the Steven Soderbergh-directed Moneyball, has been put into "limited turnaround" by Columbia Pictures honcho Amy Pascal after receiving a much different final draft of a script she once fought for. Production on the film was set to start Monday in Phoenix, and with only 96 hours to go, Soderbergh's change in vision unsettled Pascal and the brakes were immediately applied to the project. The "limited turnaround" gives Soderbergh the opportunity to try and settle with another studio, the ...