If things had progressed as they should have, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad would have been in theaters for over a month now, opening at the beginning of September to kick off the season of serious movies for grown-ups with great casts. But in July a man killed 12 people inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the trailer for Gangster Squad that depicted a shooting inside a movie theater suddenly seemed grotesque. The studio was in an impossible situation: go forward with a movie that now featured a scene that felt all too real, or force a director to remove a key sequence from his film?
In the end they settled on the latter, setting reshoots for Gangster Squad and pushing the release date to January 11, a date typically associated with films a studio just wants to get rid of. There's no reason to believe that Gangster Squad will now be a bad movie because of the reshoots-- in fact, it may be the rare bright spot among January releases. And as evidenced by a new poster that debuted on Facebook, it's carrying with it the same old-fashioned cool we saw in the earlier trailers. Take a look below:
A new trailer for Gangster Squad will premiere tomorrow at 7:30 pm ET, and that ought to give us our best sense yet of how the movie may have changed, and the sequence they shot to replace the movie theater shootout. We saw in August that reshoots were taking place in Los Angeles's Chinatown, so hopefully we'll get some glimpses of that when the trailer emerges tomorrow. In the meantime, let us know in the comments if you're still looking forward to Gangster Squad despite all these changes.
