'Babylon A.D.' Some words about film length and classificaton...

Okey-dokey. I guess there has been enough speculation about the length of Mathieu Kassovitz's film Babylon A.D. and its PG-13 film rating that some things need to be cleared up, or pushed further into discussion pending how you take this news. Thanks again to Mary for the heads up.

First, the length of the film. Seems a lot of folks get uppity when they hear about a film being shortened in length. Somehow those extra few minutes that you may or may not ever see in your lifetime tip the balance on whether you enjoy the film or not. Here is what we know about Babylon A.D. From the film blog on MySpace we read... Babylon AD has never had a 2h40min cut. This rumor came from a joke Mathieu did in front of some journalists last September. Apparently some of them didn't understand it... The approximate length of the film is 1h40min and this is what has been delivered to our partner, FOX. So I can reassure you, FOX is not chopping up the film and cutting 70min like I read- and we don't need to name names here. BUT, then we read over on British Board of Film Classification site that FOX received a 90min cut of the film. That's 10 minutes less than reported on the blog. This same classification report says that about 4% of run time is lost when transferring from film to video due to differing number of frames per second. That being said, that's only 4 minutes. We're still missing 6 minutes. Who is right? What also pushes this further into debate is that the blog reports that FOX will have their final cut on their territories and Mathieu Kassovitz has his on the European ones. So there will naturally be a few differences between the two versions. Really, how long is this film?

Second, the PG-13 rating in the U.S. Oh and about the PG13, that was a contractual agreement between Fox and us, so there is no surprise on that end. A film rating isn't the kiss of death over here but enough people seem to be concerned about it.

Okay? Clear as mud now?