The revelations from the Sony Pictures hack have just taken a rather nasty turn. Seth Rogen’s salary, whining about the very existence of Adam Sandler movies, and funny aliases that movies stars use: these all seem rather quaint in comparison to the venom spewed between producer Scott Rudin and Sony executive Amy Pascal. The two were working on the proposed Steve Jobs biopic before the project eventually collapsed (first David Fincher, then Christian Bale dropped out), and Sony decided to give up on the movie. Rudin blamed Pascal. “You’ve destroyed your relationships with half the town over how you’ve behaved on this movie, and if you don’t think it’s true, wait and see… you don’t deserve one exhalation of breath on your behalf. You’ve behaved abominably and it will be a very, very long time before I forget what you did to this movie and what you’ve put all of us through.”
The arguments seem to stem from Angelina Jolie’s desire to have Fincher not do the Jobs project, and instead direct her as Cleopatra. It’s safe to assume that Rudin won’t be getting a Christmas card from Brangelina. He didn’t see the possibility of a good movie in Cleopatra (I think I agree; it sounds like it would be a colossal disaster and be another excuse for the Jolie-Pitt brood to travel the globe first-class), and he complains Jolie’s “insanity and rampaging ego,” telling Pascal to “shut Angie down before she makes it very hard for David to do Jobs.” In another email, Rudin calls Jolie “a minimally talented spoiled brat … a camp event and a celebrity and that’s all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming.” The email leak also reveals that David Fincher thought casting Adam Driver in the new Star Wars movie was “a terrible idea,” and in a fanboy’s dream-that-almost-came-true, that Marvel and Sony came close to a deal that would see Spider-Man appearing in the next Captain America film.
