Garfield’s out of Beatty pic

Hollywood’s new “Spider-Man” has swung out of Warren Beatty’s directorial comeback.

Andrew Garfield has dropped out of the planned Howard Hughes biopic that would mark Beatty’s first project as a director in 13 years. The move has now set the drama back while Beatty finds a replacement.

Beatty had been putting together a blockbuster cast for the film, and met with “everyone in town” for roles early summer, including Garfield, Shia LaBeouf, Jack Nicholson, Evan Rachel Wood and Rooney Mara.

Beatty subsequently had Garfield and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” star Mara “locked and loaded” this month as the leads for his movie, according to a source.

But Garfield’s deal fell through when the Beatty film couldn’t get its scheduling together, possibly interfering with Garfield’s upcoming Broadway debut, sources said.

“They’re losing Andrew,” said a Hollywood source. “He’s jumping ship. Now it’s back to the drawing board [for casting].

“Warren’s movie couldn’t get it’s start date together, and was taking a long time to get going,” added the source.

“The Social Network” star Garfield is headed to the Great White Way to star in “Death of a Salesman,” produced by Scott Rudin and also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Further sources close to Garfield, currently dating fellow in-demand Hollywood young star Emma Stone, say he takes his craft seriously and values serious roles in the theater.

Beatty’s Hughes film is his first directorial project since 1998 when he was behind the camera for the political satire “Bulworth.”

He also wrote and is starring in the movie as an older version of the tycoon and aviator. Garfield would have played Hughes as a younger man. A source close to Garfield said, “Not true — he had not committed to (the) project.” Reps for Beatty didn’t get back to us by press time.

Mike Nichols will direct a revival of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman will play the traveling salesman Willy Loman, Linda Edmond will play his wife, Linda, and Andrew Garfield will follow The Amazing Spider-Man by taking the stage in the role of the Loman’s underachieving son, Biff. Scott Rudin will produce the revival, which will open next March at the Barrymore Theatre.

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Deadline told you Monday that Warren Beatty was getting behind the camera for the first time since Bulworth. Paramount and Beatty are keeping details under wraps, but here’s what I’ve heard: He will play Howard Hughes, but it’s not really a biopic; part of the plot involves an affair he had with a young woman in the later years of his life. I’ve heard that he’s going top shelf for the ensemble cast he is putting together. Here is who he’s meeting with: Andrew Garfield, Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Shia La Beouf, Jack Nicholson, Evan Rachel Wood and Rooney Mara. Beatty has wanted to play Hughes forever. The courtship of Baldwin is particularly intriguing, since in Martin Scorsese’s superb Howard Hughes movie The Aviator, Baldwin played Hughes’ main adversary, Pan Am World Airways founder Juan Trippe. We’ll see which actors end up making the movie, but it certainly sounds like this project that Beatty wrote and has ruminated on for years is going to happen in a most ambitious way.

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