New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — In a production office here, at least a couple of would-be film workers were still hanging around on Monday, hoping in vain to score with their troubled baseball movie “Moneyball.”
But they had swung, and missed.
The powers at Sony Pictures, which was supposed to finance the film, and the Creative Artists Agency, whose prize client Brad Pitt had agreed to star in it, were, meanwhile, wrapping up a rhubarb with the director Steven Soderbergh, a clutch of producers and each other. This followed Sony’s decision to halt the picture just days before shooting was to have begun in Los Angeles, Oakland and Phoenix last week.
The last-minute demise of a high-profile film project, especially one starring an A-list star like Mr. Pitt, is Hollywood’s equivalent of a bridge collapse. Painful, expensive, and damaging to all involved, the spectacle is rare. It happened with “Used Guys,” a high-priced comedy at 20th Century Fox in 2006.
But such disasters — this one is estimated to have cost Sony $10 million in development and pre-production costs — may become more common as an increasingly nervous film business comes to terms with a sharp decline in home video revenue, the diminishing power of even the most popular stars to muscle their projects into production and new uncertainty over complicated bets like “Moneyball.”