Fox is dumb and so are parents

By ian

A few weeks ago, I saw a few trailers for the new Hitman movie based on the Hitman video game series. I was pretty psyched because Hitman has a great story and the games have a brutal sense of realism that I’ve really enjoyed. The initial trailers showed promise and with the exception of adding the requisite Hollywood love interest, it seemed pretty faithful to the story.

Unfortunately, this morning it was announced that the director was being changed to help avoid an R rating. REALLY?!? Fox is concerned with having an R rating for a movie called Hitman? Especially a movie called Hitman based on a video game with an mature rating. This is especially frustrating because the movie has already been filmed and is being released on about a month, so I can’t really see how they’re going to tone it down with out either removing plot elements or re-filming.

While I’m frustrated that Fox is toning down a movie that should be perfectly fine with an R rating, I do understand why. Based on my experience at KB Toys, parents don’t care about video game ratings, but they do care about movie ratings. When they were younger, video games were far from graphic or traumatic and games weren’t even rated, but movies were. Older generations haven’t been pre-programmed to think of video games in the same way as movies like the current generation. As a side affect, we see parents that wouldn’t dream of sending their 12 year old to an R-rated movie, but have no problems about them seeing the same brutal content in a video game.

The other problem I have is that the PG-13 rating has nothing to do with the copious amounts of murder that will happen in this movie. What does it say about the rating system when murder is ok, but blood isn’t? In the end, if you have half a brain this doesn’t affect you that much because you can make intelligent decisions about what you and your kids are watching. I just don’t like when the decision is made for me.