Tweet

My good friend Peter over at /Film is reporting today that Warner Bros., the studio behind Tim Burton’s upcoming adaptation Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is looking to “hack” up the film a little bit in order to earn a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. Allegedly the early footage is wicked bloody, so much so that it has squeamish studio heads spinning.

Of course, even the most dizzied state can’t prevent them from thinking about their pocket books, and it appears that Mr. Burton is not happy about it.

From The Daily Mail:

“Tim’s not happy that the studio is asking for so many cuts to the cutting, as it were,” someone connected to the film told the Daily Mail. “The thing is, the studio really likes the film and they want to make it accessible to as big an audience as possible – which means stemming the blood flow. But that’s a bit difficult for a story involving a guy who gets high slitting throats.”

“Accessible to as big an audience as possible” is the classic argument for PG-13. So in other words, it means that the film will make more money. That is not completely unreasonable though, considering the star power of Johnny Depp and the fact that his last two films, two little Pirate movies from Disney, made a relatively large amount of booty at the box office. But this does bring to the forefront the battle between filmmaker and studio. If Tim Burton is not happy with such a decision from the studio, that bodes well for purist fans of “Sweeney Todd”, as it is based on a play with some pretty messy material.

As Peter at /Film explains, in the film/play, Sweeney Todd (Depp) is a murderous barber who cuts the throats of those who sit in his mechanical barber’s chair. The victims are then slid through a trap door down to the kitchen of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bohnam Carter), Todd’s mistress, who then makes them into meat pies. And according to the report from The Daily Mail, the worst of the early footage from the film included a “ten-year-old boy cutting up body parts, which were then thrown into a meat grinder and turned into mince.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds yummy.

On the Side: Sam Mendes was originally attached to direct the ‘Sweeney Todd’ adaptation with Russell Crowe in the title role. Yikes!