Warner Bros. Pulls 'Gangster Squad' Trailer, Schedules Emergency Reshoots

Warner Bros. has pulled the trailer for Gangster Squad from theaters and online channels after the mass shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. The trailer — and the film itself — featured a sequence in which gangsters open fire on an audience through a movie screen at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The studio has now gone further, delaying the Ruben Fleischer film from its September 7 date to January 2013 and scheduling reshoots that will relocate the scene entirely. Screenwriter Will Beall is reworking the sequence, which insiders describe as pivotal to the film's third act; the replacement is expected to move the shootout to Los Angeles' Chinatown.

Gangster Squad is based on Paul Lieberman's book of the same name, itself grown from his Los Angeles Times series about the secret LAPD unit that fought Mickey Cohen's mob in the 1940s. Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and Sean Penn star.

Update: the film ultimately opened on January 11, 2013, with the Chinatown sequence in place of the theater scene. The episode remains one of the clearest examples of real-world tragedy reshaping a finished studio picture — a story we cover in the catalog entry for the 2013 film.