The killing of 12 people and injuring of 58 at the midnight premiere of Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado, last Friday has, for better or worse, induced a climate of self-censorship at Time Warner’s entertainment subsidiaries.
The massacre has unsurprisingly led the studio to move “Gangster Squad” from September 7 to January 11 next year, therefore limiting its awards opportunities. DC Comics, owned by Time Warner, is meanwhile delaying the release of “Batman Inc #3” until August 22. Both the movie and the comic contain scenes that could be considered offensive to the Aurora wounded and the relatives of those who died.
“Gangster Squad” is a period crime thriller, starring Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Stone, about the LAPD’s attempts to keep members of the East Coast mafia out of Los Angeles in the '40s and '50s. It climaxes with a scene in which gangsters in a movie theater spray bullets through the screen at the audience. This scene will now be cut and reshot in a different kind of location. The film will be partially re-structured.
“Batman Inc #3” is the latest from the Scottish comic-book writer Grant Morrison and illustrator Chris Burnham. It is being held back, says The Guardian, because it “‘contains content that may be perceived as insensitive in light of recent events.’” The nature of the potentially problematic material, which relates to “a major international threat,” has not yet been revealed, but Burnham has tweeted: “It’s not just a Batman comic with guns in it. There’s a specific scene that made DC & the whole Bat-team say ‘Yikes’. Too close for comfort.”
Deadline’s Nikki Finke meanwhile reports that Summit Entertainment, a subsidiary of Lions Gate, is going ahead with plans to open its feelgood dance movie “Step Up Revolution” in 2,500 theaters on Friday, despite the inclusion of a sequence that, though bloodless, is eerily close in some respects to the start of the Aurora massacre. Finke notes that “the dancers steal into a party, wearing body vests and gas masks and using gas grenades to threaten the guests” – behavior close to that of the Aurora perpetrator, James Holmes, who wore a gas mask and body armor and let off two smoke devices before he began shooting.
The studio omitted some of these details when it issued the following statement: “Summit Entertainment’s ‘Step Up Revolution’ is an uplifting film that celebrates the redemptive power of dance. There is a brief scene in the film in which a troop [sic] of dancers enter a room wearing gas masks as props and the dancers immediately go into a choreographed routine. Because of last week’s tragic event in Colorado, Summit immediately removed television advertising that briefly showcased that scene from the film. The scene also briefly appeared in a trailer released three months ago that the studio is no longer actively servicing. Having taken these steps, Summit will open this inspirational, nonviolent film in theatres nationwide this weekend as originally edited.”