Looks like the rumours that Tim Burton was being asked to cut Sweeney Todd by DreamWorks were untrue. The rumours had DreamWorks asking Tim Burton to slice the film down as they were unpleased at how dark and gruesome the film had become, this was mainly in order to get a PG-13 U.S. rating rather than the R it was heading for.

However, from the latest word it looks as though DreamWorks always planned on the film having an R rating and are more than happy with that, in fact it seems that they haven't even seen the completed film yet, nor are they going to until later on in September. In fact the word is that they've come out behind the film even more.

Cinema Blend find the rumour killer from Variety 's sources and it sounds pretty solid to me. In fact I'm so glad that the studio are taking this route, in fact they say it best when they point out that since the story involves slicing people's necks open to kill them and then making them into pies you would assume that this wouldn't be a kid friendly film, and it shouldn't be really.

Here's the final point to the story though, after seeing some clips of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, the sources say that DreamWorks are so happy with it that they're changing the Xmas limited release to a full release. Now that doesn't sound like a studio who have asked the filmmaker to radically cut back the violence does it?