Fox Yanks HIT MAN From Director Xavier Gens

*** We've just had an official response to this story from the PR arm of Fox, you can find the details here. ***

While there has been no official word on this so far I'm hearing it from enough sources very close to the film itself and the principals involved that I'm quite confident reporting it as fact. Word is out that Fox has yanked control of upcoming video game adaptation away from director Xavier Gens. This happens from time to time if a director turns in weak footage but that is not the case here. After being hired to shoot an adaptation of the ultra-violent video game Gens took Asian action films such as The Killer and A Bittersweet Life as his starting point and turned in an explicitly violent, very bloody cut of the film that apparently included a number of head shots and extreme gore moments that would have guaranteed the film a hard R rating. Which really shouldn't have been any sort of surprise if the studio execs had been paying any attention at all - it's not like they wouldn't have seen the dailies or effects work ahead of time - but apparently after seeing Gens' cut of the film the studio removed him from the project and placed Nicolas De Toth in control of a new edit of the film. Who's De Toth? He's the man behind the edit of Live Free Or Die Hard, a job he was hired for specifically to turn in an entirely bloodless version of the film and word is that this is his task with Hit Man as well. So what are we going to get? A bloodless version of the film assembled with no input whatsoever from Gens. Very sad considering just how promising the trailers have been so far.