Just a short week after the horrifying the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad has been moved from its scheduled September 7th release date.

As The Playlist is reporting, Gangster Squad has been pushed back to a January 11, 2013 release date and is set to have even more changes–yep, that’s right: rewrites, rewrites, rewrites. Why? Generally when a movie gets this kind of treatment, it stems back to the oh-so-familiar case of not testing well among audiences in marketing pre-screeners, but this isn’t the case here. Nope, instead all these changes are interrelated to the recent awful shooting.

If you’ve been to a movie this summer, then surely you’ve seen a trailer for Gangster Squad, the star-studded movie which documents the LAPD’s efforts to keep East Coast mafia crime at bay in LA during the 1940′s and 50s by taking some of their cops off the so-called books. Like The Departed meets LA Confidential, Gangster Squad looks just as fun because of its plot as it does because of its acting talent. How could it not with a cast made up of Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Giovani Ribisi, Josh Brolin, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, and Michael Pena?

Anyway, back to the trailer– so yes, if you’ve seen any big movie this summer, then chances are it was accompanied by the Gangster Squad trailer. And if that was the case, then you might have noticed that it ended with a very inopportune (for the time being, that is) shooting in which the Squad shoots through the back of a screen in a movie theater at the audience. In light of current events, this trailer was immediately pulled from The Dark Knight Rises preview list. And now, we have word that not only has it been pushed back, but they are in the midst of rewrites, presumably to change the scene in question.

Here’s the thing: yes, it makes sense to delay the release of a movie which invokes the pleasure of watching a fantasy world of violence and gun play. It definitely seems like the right thing to do. But rewrites too? It seems a bit excessive to me. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if 75% of the movie shows a character with a gun-in-hand. Yes, the movie theater scene might appear to be the one that mostly harks back to that horrific night 8 days ago, but then it would be possible to argue that so would any movie featuring the idealization of guns and gun play.

My hope (as well as the article in question) is that audiences would be able to separate the two– one being real life and one being a fictional onscreen world. Better safe than sorry, I guess, which is the stance that The Weinstein Company is taking.

Catch the new and hopefully improved Gangster Squad now out January 11th.