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Columbia, which is still trying to make "Moneyball" work with Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh, is hardly the only studio grappling with the budgets of star-driven films in the new economic realities for Hollywood.

Fox is going through the same budget-scrutinizing process on "Unstoppable," the Tony Scott-directed drama to which Denzel Washington and Chris Pine are attached. The picture, in which a young conductor and a veteran engineer chase a runaway train filled with toxic chemicals, had originally been pegged to start production in August for a summer 2010 release.

Studio insiders said the film isn't yet greenlit, but the studio is wrestling hard with the cost of mounting a big-scale action pic plus the star salaries of Scott, Washington and Pine, who chose this film as his first since his breakout role as Captain Kirk in "Star Trek." Studio is optimistic that it will get the film off the ground, but fall is now a more realistic starting point.