Flash Cuts: August 18, 2009

British tabloid The Daily Mirror, which has a less-than-sterling record when it comes to reporting movie gossip, states Brad Pitt popped over to London to shoot a string of scenes with Guy Ritchie as Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty. This is the first anyone had heard of Pitt being involved, and there’s no mention of Moriarty in the film’s promo materials. (The character was briefly in an early draft of the script, but trimmed out by the time shooting started.) The production team sent out a press release saying the report was “completely inaccurate.”

More lawsuits are flying around “Terminator: Salvation,” and none of them have to do with the quality of the movie. The Halcyon Company financed the film with a little help from a hedge fund called Pacificor, and two of the film’s producers are suing fraud, double-dealing and conspiring with the fund’s CEO, Andy Mitchell. There’s also a suit in play from Dominion Group, which owns Halcyon, of “wrongfully filing a lien on Dominion’s assets to block it from obtaining financing for Halcyon.” Add it all together, and you get the argument that Pacificor bullied their way into financing “Terminator: Salvation,” then backed Halcyon into a corner to get a bigger piece of the pie. The movie made $244 million internationally.

Peter “Gaga” Antonijevic will direct Josh Lucas, Terrence Howard and Lake Bell in a thriller called “Little Murder” … Mike Nichols has signed on to direct the film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Deep Water … Writer James Vanderbilt, after turning in a screenplay for “Spider-Man 4″ that made Sam Raimi actually interested in coming back to the franchise, has been hired by Sony to pen the scripts for Spidey 5 and 6.