There's some terrible news out that is suggesting the upcoming film is going to take more of a hit than expected. If rumours are correct t seems that the studio is about to make the same mistake that happens on so many films these days, they're kicking out the Director.

The word is that Xavier Gans has turned in a bloody and explicit version of Hitman and the studio have decided they don't like it. So they've kicked him off and handed the film to someone else to edit, and it's no surprise who that name is.

Nicolas De Toth is the man who recut Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard) (Filmstalker review) and managed to make something of the excellent film without any blood or swearing. Now there's no denying that he didn't turn in a really good film anyway, but it was stupid and narrow minded to create such a cut of a film that has built a reputation partly on these aspects.

Todd over at the stunningly excellent Twitch has the news of the raping of Xavier Gans' Hitman which I found through Rope of Silicon, sorry Todd I seem to have lost Twitch's feed from my reader…something that will be remedied in seconds.

Twitch has heard this rumour from various sources, and I'm pretty confident that they will be right, these guys don't often write about straight up rumours.

This is insane. There's quite a trend for this kind of action from studios, and if you look at the times it has been done it has produced a film that hasn't worked or has fallen short of expectation. Die Hard 4.0 is probably an exception because of the amazing work done by Len Wiseman beforehand and the fact that it is Die Hard.

However look at AvP: Aliens vs Predator which was hit with the same treatment, or perhaps The Invasion rework, The Eye rework or the Exorcist prequels (Filmstalker reviews here and here).

What's worse here is that the Hitman game, the source material for the film, is a mature audience game with all the gore and violence, so they all knew from the start. Then there was the script, the dailies, etc. Surely at some point the studio would have thought that this was going to be a violent film at some point?

You know what I'm thinking, call me a conspiracy nut if you like, but saying the studio didn't realise how the film would turn out is just plain idiotic. I don't buy self assembly furniture without knowing how it's going to look at the end.

Perhaps this is a deliberate studio action. Create an R rated film, recut it and release it in cinemas as a lighter PG or 12 to rake in the lower age audience, then release a full R rated DVD version and rake the cash in again.

Yeah, I might be cynical, but it sure seems like a marketing strategy that moronic studio executives would come up with.

Having miscast Timothy Olyphant, I wasn't totally on board with this film anyway, but the trailers were pulling me back in. Now though, I think it's dead to me.