Brad Pitt's baseball drama Moneyball scores a trailer

The first trailer for Moneyball , the real-life baseball drama starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, has landed online.

If the words 'real-life baseball drama' have got you heading for the door already, stop and give this a chance, as it looks like a pretty unique spin on a well-worn genre.

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the manager of Oakland Athletics. He's struggling to put together a decent team on an extremely limited budget, until he meets office worker Peter Brand (Hill), who convinces him to run the team in a totally new way.

Their method eschews traditional tactics in favour of closely analysing statistics to organise the best possible team from a meagre bunch of players. Beane faces adversity from his superiors, until it starts to look like his mad method could just shake up the game.

When you look at the talent involved, it's hard to believe that Moneyball almost didn't get made.

After a troubled production, the film gained Bennett Miller ( Capote ) as a director, and Aaron Sorkin gave Steve Zaillian's script a polish. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright co-star.

Here's that trailer:

Moneyball is set to open on 4 November 2011.

Matt Maytum
Editor, Total Film

I'm the Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the running of the mag, and generally obsessing over all things Nolan, Kubrick and Pixar. Over the past decade I've worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at GamesRadar+, and you can often hear me nattering on the Inside Total Film podcast. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.