An article on the Latino Review Website by George Roush claims that an anonymous source “deep within the bowels of Hollywood” is reporting that Lionsgate wants The Punisher: War Zone movie released with a PG-13 rating and that there is a considerable behind-the-scenes struggle going on concerning what the final cut of the film will look like.

One thing appears to be certain—director Lexi Alexander is off the project.  Back in April ICv2 reported that the release date for Punisher: War Zone had been moved to December based on information from Ms. Alexander’s personal Website (see “Punisher: War Zone Moves to December”).  Now all references to the Punisher movie have been scrubbed from Alexander’s site like so many disgraced Politburo members erased from a Soviet history text—and one wonders if she still stands by her comments concerning her experience in working with Lionsgate: “it's not nearly as bad as some of my filmmaker friends predicted it would be. I guess I got away with an actual okay studio experience.”

According to the Latino Review the impetus behind the move to a PG-13 rating was supplied by the tremendous success of the PG-13-rated The Dark Knight.  Perhaps a better comics-to-film analog for the Punisher than the hugely popular Batman character would be Mark Millar's Wanted, which has been quite successful ($133 million) in spite of its R rating. Lionsgate’s original 2004 Punisher film was rated R, and frankly the character of Frank Castle/The Punisher as portrayed in the comics would appear to lend itself far more readily to an R-rated movie.  Will Lionsgate ratchet down the violence and make Punisher: War Zone a PG-13 release—and if so will fans of the Punisher comics want to see a tamped-down version of their favorite anger-fueled urban avenger?