The deadline is fast approaching on Steven Soderbergh’s plans to retire and pursue his painting career, meaning that he has to spend every waking moment in the next year making as many films as he can—presumably before his Retirement Machine is automatically triggered and he’s suddenly slapped with a palette and beret, and unable to use his arms for anything but making pointillist landscapes. So when he recently dropped out of adapting ’60s spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the first question on everyone’s mind was, “That show where Robert Vaughn danced with a gorilla?”
And the second question, because everyone had talked about that already, was what Soderbergh might do to fill those few months in between finishing his Channing Tatum stripper movie, Magic Mike, and making the Liberace biopic that ostensibly will cap off his directing career. Today The Hollywood Reporter suggests he’ll reteam with U.N.C.L.E. writer Scott Z. Burns on The Bitter Pill, “a thriller set in the world of psychopharmacology,” the craziest, most insane pharmacology there is. The Playlist expands on the story somewhat, noting that Burns was once developing it on his own as The Side Effects, a story “about how we as a society can’t tolerate sadness and what that makes us vulnerable to.” So… a movie about people unable to stop watching that video where the cat can't believe he's riding in a a car?