For years, Hollywood has watched (and frequently lawyered up) as third party companies, such as ClearPlay and VidAngel, recut their films without permission, took out all the swearing, sex, and excessive violence and offered them to audiences who wanted to watch movies clean versions of hit movies. I don’t understand why somebody would bother in the first place with a cleaned up version of “Deadpool,” for example, but Sony is now hoping to tap into that market, and instead of paying for lawyers, just offer up clean edits of their own films.
The studio has announced today they’ll be offering broadcast and airline versions of films to customers through iTunes, Vudu, and Fandango Now. They’ll be kicking off with 24 titles, many of which, again, hard to understand why anybody would want to watch them without all the delicious filth (here’s looking at you, “Step Brothers”). Here’s the first wave of titles:
- 50 First Dates
- Battle Of The Year
- Big Daddy
- Captain Phillips
- Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
- Easy A
- Elysium
- Ghostbusters
- Ghostbusters II
- Goosebumps
- Grown Ups
- Grown Ups 2
- Hancock
- Inferno
- Moneyball
- Pixels
- Spider-Man
- Spider-Man 2
- Spider-Man 3
- The Amazing Spider-Man
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2
- Step Brothers
- Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
- White House Down
So, I guess this is good if your parents ask to watch something you know is going to make everyone uncomfortable, giving you the opportunity to slip in the sanitized version of ‘Talladega Nights.’ Otherwise, Sony is serving a very small niche of consumers, but let’s hope the rest of us don’t accidentally rent or purchase the wrong versions, because as you’ll see in the video below, the edits are pretty ridiculous. [Yahoo]