Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Summit Entertainment is in final negotiations to make a green light commitment on The Bitter Pill, the Scott Z. Burns script that Steven Soderbergh will direct as his next film. Production will start in April on a thriller which has a budget in the $30 million range. Deadline revealed that Summit was the frontrunner for a script that wasn’t distributed widely, at least initially. David Linde’s Lava Bear and Paramount were the other initial places (producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura’s deal is there), though a few equity financiers mulled the project as well. Soderbergh sparked to the film after Warner Bros halted The Man From U.N.C.L.E. after disagreements over budget and difficulty finding the lead after George Clooney dropped out because he was getting surgery. The film is a potboiler in the Jagged Edge-Basic Instinct mold about a troubled and depressed woman who is taking serious amounts of prescription drugs to deal with the anxiety surrounding the pending release of her husband from prison. Burns wrote it several years ago and set it up at Miramax under the title The Side Effects, intending to direct it but never getting there because of his busy scripting schedule that included the Soderbergh projects Contagion, The Informant! and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The deal was shopped by UTA and Anonymous Content.