20 Things You Didn’t Know About Moneyball
The Oscar-nominated sports classic was almost very different.
The underdog sports movie is such a well-trod subgenre that film fans rarely expect much new or particularly interesting from it, but Bennett Miller's 2011 film Moneyball is a rarest one to stand out from the pack.
Based on Michael Lewis' 2003 book of the same name, the movie follows the Oakland Athletics' near-mythic 2002 baseball season, as their general manager Billy Beane attempted to use data and statistics to assemble a team of undervalued sportsmen.
Moneyball was ultimately nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Brad Pitt's performance as Beane, and Best Supporting Actor for Jonah Hill, who played his assistant general manager Peter Brand.
Almost a decade later, Moneyball continues to persist as an uncommonly thoughtful film about the marriage between sports and big business, and how smart and creative people were able to make the absolute most of their team's payroll spend.
As a result, this is a modern sports classic which operates on two very different levels, and proves all the more entertaining for it.
But the final film was almost so very different, and amid the various morsels of fascinating trivia here, it's clear that Moneyball's success was a fortuitous collision of talent, luck, and good timing...