Whether they needed to or not, Warner Bros. went into something of a panic after last month’s tragic theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado and made plans to scrap a key scene from their upcoming release Gangster Squad. You see, their crime film’s climax also concerned a shooting taking place in a movie theater, and the studio figured that creating a fantasy tragedy that so closely resembled a recent, real-life tragedy would have been in bad taste. After a bit of deliberation, the plan was to completely rewrite and reshoot the sequence, a process which would push the film’s release from September 7 to sometime in 2013 (now confirmed as January 11).
Of course, given that reshoots necessarily pushed back the release date of the film, further discussion was created around the issue of whether or not a movie coming out in 2013 would need to change its content because of a shooting that happened in 2012. It’s an interesting line the studio is straddling between acting in good taste and censoring art. But, no matter where your opinion on the issue lies, what’s been decided has been decided, and director Ruben Fleischer and crew are going forward with the reshoots.
Which brings us to the new news regarding the situation. THR has word that a replacement for the theater-set scene has been decided, and a time schedule for getting all of the principal players back together has been nailed down. Reportedly the scene that was set in The Chinese Theater will now take place somewhere in Chinatown. Originally the sequence was set during Christmas in Hollywood in 1950, so presumably a chunk of the historic neighborhood will now be dressed to fit in with the era as well. Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Anthony Mackie, Robert Patrick, Troy Garity, and Michael Pena are all being reassembled for the reshoots, which are scheduled to take place the week of August 20.
Now that a plan has been hammered out, let’s just hope that nothing horrific happens in a Chinese neighborhood between now and then, less we all get thrown into yet another moral quagmire regarding a silly gangster movie.