Up until now, I haven’t had much interest in the upcoming Hitman movie based on the popular video game series. I thought the first trailer looked weak, an indication of yet another hopeless game adaptation destined to bomb at the box office. And yet, there were some signs of potential in there, with the involvement of lead actor Timothy Olyphant and talented young French director Xavier Gens (Frontière(s)). This week there comes a strange report on the film courtesy of Twitch: it seems that Fox have pulled Xavier Gens off the project after he turned in a rather violent first cut that “included a number of head shots and extreme gore moments that would have guaranteed the film a hard R rating”. To replace him, they have brought in clean up man Nicolas De Toth, the same guy who sanitized and reassembled Live Free or Die Hard to make it PG-13 compliant.

Obviously this seems like a bad sign, especially when they hired a director who is known for gore and horror, only to later tell him that’s not what they wanted. Regardless of what people thought of Live Free or Die Hard, I think we can all agree that it’s a pretty different film than Hitman. There are strong characters and humour and action set pieces that still work even in a PG-13 setting. I think that pushing the envelope with violence was one of the few things Hitman had going for it, and now they’re screwing themselves. If they were smart, they would have kept Gens on board, submitted the cut to the MPAA with the knowledge that it would get an R-rating, and then publicized that fact before chopping it down to a PG-13 anyway. What they’re doing here is only going to worry people further and most likely end up generating negative buzz… forcing them to later try and recoup their losses with the Unrated Director’s Cut on DVD! What a waste.

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