I’m a little confounded that Warner Brothers couldn’t get their shit together and make a budget and a leading man happen for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which would have been a new spy thriller from Steven Soderbergh had the film been pushed through. As it is, the project is currently shuttered with Soderbergh looking for a new feature to fit in his schedule after the release of Haywire, before production of Behind The Candelabra with HBO, and somewhere in between the release of his completed male-stripper-movie Magic Mike. I guess Cooper was all they had in ’em.

In any event, that project is gone and now Soderbergh has mined the back-catalog of his preferred scribe Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, The Informant!, U.N.C.L.E.) and latched onto a script the writer put together some years ago with intention to direct. Now called The Bitter Pill, it explores the tragic life of a woman severely dependent on prescription drugs as she spirals downward due to anxiety from her imprisoned husband’s imminent release.

Soderbergh and Burns have shopped the script around town recently and rumors last week that Summit was interested have developed into word from Deadline that the studio is a gnat’s ass away from a greenlight on a $30m production to start in April. While there’s no indication that WB and Soderbergh aren’t still perfectly friendly, apparently the pair did not shop the script around that particular water tower this time around…

I’m definitely pleased about any news that promises Soderbergh making films, but it’s not as if we’re going to lack for the man’s work over the next year or two. Regardless, good for the director for rebounding a major project shutdown into a minor speedbump.

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