Fox Studios has responded to a report that it is curtailing the violence in the upcoming Hitman movie in an effort to secure a friendlier rating.
The initial report from movie site Twitch claimed that Fox had replaced director Xavier Gens with Nicolas De Toth after seeing Gens’ cut of the film, which reportedly was “an explicitly violent, very bloody cut of the film that apparently included a number of head shots and extreme gore moments that would have guaranteed the film a hard R rating.” The article claims De Toth did the same sanitizing job on Live Free or Die Hard, on which he served as an editor.
The report was covered widely by both movie and gaming sites, leading Fox to respond today by saying that De Toth was brought in as a consultant, not an editor. Furthermore, Gens is still working on the movie, and the studio says it will be released with an R rating, presumably with the violent content intact.
Hitman, based on the popular Eidos games featuring the adventures of the mysterious super-assassin Agent 47, his theaters on November 21.
