Warner Bros. has officially pushed back its gangster film Gangster Squad from September 7, 2012 to January 11, 2013. In the wake of a Colorado movie theater shooting that killed 12 and injured many more during The Dark Knight Rises, Warner Bros. has decided to re-shoot and re-edit a scene that's been shown in trailers until recently.
In the scene, there is a shootout in a movie theater where several people are gunned down as people emerge from behind the screen. They will now re-shoot the sequence, which they could not have done with an opening just over a month away. It is a crucial scene that will require other scenes to be re-shot to accommodate the changes.
Gangster Squad, which takes place in the late 1940s, has a small squad of LAPD gunmen (Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling) trying to take down the Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn).
While I totally agree with the decision to remove the trailer altogether (or at least that scene from it), I don't think that Warner Bros. should reshoot entire scenes. And according to comments around the internet, it seems like make people that are planning on seeing the movie agree. It's good to know that Warner Bros. is showing respect for those involved in the Aurora, Colorado shooting, but I think simply moving the movie back would have been enough.
Still, odds are the general public would have hated if they didn't change the scene, and no one can really blame Warner Bros. for doing so. The movie has a stellar cast and looks fantastic, so now I'll just have to wait a little longer to see it.
You can follow Movies and Culture Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ
