I'm from philly, and I gotta agree, this is about as fuckin dumb as it gets...sure, it's a shame what happened to that cop...and the fact that the fuckheads around here have gotten so outta hand they're shooting cops left and right these days...the Hitman ads have nothing to do with it....and they sure as hell don't remind me of the bumbling dumb fuck who shot the cop entering Dunkin Donuts...for the longest time, the local news have sections, with intros like "City in Crisis", all about people gettin shot every night...long before any Hitman ads...but I guess taking them down will magically make the violence disappear.

Philly is friggin' crazy and it doesn't help when there is a lack of prevention of violence by maintaining proper law but they will take down posters like this. WTF!

If someone from the hitman movie or their advertising company gets wind of this and takes exception to it they could sue for breach of 1st amendment rights. I know that sounds cliche, but its a right we all have, people died for it and if we don't use it then they died for nothing. How much money do you think that would cost the people living in Philly? So then they would still have the gun violence and now a nice fat lawsuit to waste their tax dollars on all because of some pictures. Granted Philly is going through some tough times and my heart goes out to the officers over there. These ads couldn't have come at a worse time, but I don't think this was over the line. Maybe if they had posters of Kanye and Lynch shooting at cops then yea I could understand.

Nearly naked? Thats as close as my girlfriend gets to nearly naked anymore and I gotta say that I'm getting a little blue...

The movie looks like shitte.

If Hitman is based on a game all about stealth and silencing your targets in a discreet manner, then why are there explosions galore in the trailer?


That guy is too short to be Agent 47.

I live in philly and the gun violence here is a huge problem. While I dont agree with the article, I think you should be a little more understanding about the conditions under which it was written.

Obviously, guns in posters do *not* guarantee a well-regulated militia, necessary for the security of a free state!

You forgot to link tot the article where Kotaku had NO clue what article they were refering to. I guess they don't go out often...

And to restate for emphasis: James fucking Bond.

i was wondering if you guys would do a story on this. kudos. while i feel for those involved with the cop shooting, the reaction to the ad is ridiculous... just as bad as when you there over the pond banned the Burnout: Paradise ad.

I'm amazed by how 95% of you seem to have no sense of understanding whatsoever. There's no dialogue here, it's just "Bah, censorship! Stupid!" Perhaps "sense of context" would be more appropriate, actually. You don't wear a Megadeath t-shirt to a funeral, and you don't put up posters for movies where the hero is a paid killer when your city has recently been through significant gun-play related tragedies. Common sense.

Here's the context:

Cop gets shot, writer sounds like a 1950's housewife and complained about "half naked" females "draped" over people. I laugh.

That is the context.

@BigPunch and Sharpless

Let me preface the following by saying that I really don't mean to seem like a giant unfeeling douche bag here, despite how it may look. I am just going to say what I feel, and leave it at that.

I'm sorry, I truly am, but how is letting emotions govern the removal of something in this particular case any better or less retarded than when, say, the emotional parents of murdered (or murdering) children call for the banning of video games that supposedly caused their kids to be killed (or to kill)? In both cases, it's an irrational snap judgment based on emotional gut reaction against something that is almost entirely irrelevant to the situation. Yes, I do understand why it might have been done, regardless of what you may think, and while I do have utmost sympathy for a police officer having been killed, I still don't think that makes this an okay thing to do, no matter what the motivating force behind it may have been. This poster did not kill anyone, nor did the movie it is promoting, nor did the video game on which the movie is based (and that's likely the real issue here, because if this had been a James Bond poster instead of one for a video game movie, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion at all), and in fact none of these things had anything whatsoever to do with the tragedy that occurred. The only thing even remotely linking the two is that there just happens to be a picture of a man holding a gun. That's it, that's all, so why should it have been removed? Are all other gun related things going banned because of this as well? Are guns themselves being banned because of this? I don't think so, so why this? Just because this horrible thing happened in or near your hometown does not somehow make it okay that this mostly unrelated thing is being irrationally removed for no good reason. That there was a reason, given the context, I don't deny at all, but I still don't think it was a good one. It disappoints me that just because it happened near where you live, you seem to think that it was a legitimate reason, or at least that's the way it appears to me.

Again, I don't mean to be a heartless asshole here, but this is just the way I feel. And yes, I would be saying the same thing if something like this happened in my own city or, god forbid, to my own family on the opposite coast, because I would like to think that I would be able to keep my head about me at least enough to realize that a poster for a movie had nothing at all to do with it. That's all.

@Action Bastard

It should be entirely obvious that being a dumb fuck is... well... a dumb fuck thing to be, without the need to preach it. And even if it were preached here, the dumb fucks who really need to hear it are likely too busy out doing dumb fuck things to even see it. But just in case there's someone here who may indeed need to hear it, let me preach it here: DON'T BE A DUMB FUCK! Don't do the things Action Bastard described in his post, because you would have to be retarded to even consider it.

Anyway, yeah, the robbers of that Dunkin' Donuts shop were indeed the dumbest of fucks. With that said, what does a poster for a movie have to do with the price of tea in China, be it Hitman or James Bond or whatever, aside from the OMG A GUN!!! angle? Hitman didn't somehow force those guys to be colossally dumb fucks, and in fact had nothing to do with it, again aside from the OMG A GUN!!! thing. And yet it got taken down as a result of it.

However, as we can see here, some people are saying that in this case, just this once, maybe it's kind of okay that something got removed, because there were extenuating circumstances, no matter how utterly flimsy they may be. Emotional gut reaction should not be a factor for determining something like this, no matter the time or context, in my opinion, and yet it was. This is why there is a need to preach on the wrongs of censorship, in my opinion.

Again, if I sound like an asshat here, so be it, even though it's not my intent. I simply feel that this all needed to be said.

Utterly ridiculous. Nothing wrong with that ad.

->Im OK: Thanks for rewriting again the whole "censorship bad" schtick so the rest of us don't have to.

->Sharpless/Bastard: If the authorities have a problem with guns, they should ban guns and not pictures of them. Conversely, if they have a problem with pictures of guns, they should ban all of them. All films, games, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, documentaries by this logic should not be allowed distribution in phillie, otherwise it'd be a double standard. Seeing as I'm sure you'll agree this would be utterly insane, which is why I feel this banning is stupid. Society is me, and you, and the rest of them. It's a group of individuals. If everything that offended a small minority of society was banned, nothing would legally be allowed to exist.