Unstoppable stopped?

The upcoming Denzel Washington action-thriller UNSTOPPABLE has done the unthinkable; it has stopped. The project was on the fast-track at Fox with filming scheduled to begin this September for director Tony Scott but budget disagreements have put the brakes on the project. Washington was set to co-star with STAR TREK’s Chris Pine but the poor performance of TAKING OF PELHAM 123, another Denzel/Scott project, gave Fox some cause for concern.

The film, a fairly by-the-numbers flick about a runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals and the engineers tasked with stopping it before, well, boom. While the project hasn’t quite entered the critical level that the Brad Pitt flick MONEYBALL did when Sony halted production two days before filming was scheduled to begin but if producers and Scott can’t scale back the costs of the film, UNSTOPPABLE could be derailed (last train related pun, I promise).

I’m guessing that unlike MONEYBALL there will be a fairly swift and amicable conclusion to all this. Whereas MONEYBALL was a somewhat abstract baseball film, UNSTOPPABLE has a considerable amount of box-office potential here and abroad (especially with a proven star in Denzel and an up-and-comer in Chris Pine). So let’s cut out the boring subplot about the ancient symbols and the “Matrix of Leadership” and get this thing going! (Oh wait, that was another movie’s boring subplot…)