James L. Brooks's How Do You Know isn't exactly aiming to be the next big thing among teenage audiences, but it stars Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, all of whom have been known to appeal to young viewers once in a whle (we'll ignore the film's fourth lead, Jack Nicholson, for the sake of argument). So when the movie was slapped with an R-rating over a handful of bad words and subsequently lost its appeal to the MPAA, Sony had no choice but to recut it.
According to Variety, the studio has planned to erase a few f-bombs for the sake of a PG-13 rating for the film, which opens December 17. Sadly the same option is not available to The King's Speech, the Weinstein Company release that features Colin Firth's character, King George VI, unleashing a string of curse words in an attempt to curse his stutter (it's a legitimate speech therapy technique!) The Weinsteins have been charged with appealing two ridiculous MPAA ratings, between The King's Speech's R and Blue Valentine's NC-17, and they probably wish they could be as lucky as Sony, who can cut out two words and be free and clear.
