8 Upcoming Movies That Have Sparked Massive Controversy
3. Death Wish
Release Date: 2 March 2018
The Controversy: In Death Wish, a middle-aged man - played by Bruce Willis - buys a gun and takes to the streets after his wife is killed, shooting up thugs and criminals, and generally taking the law into his own hands.
The film's first trailer had many people questioning why such a film needs to exist, considering how prevalent mass shootings have become over the last few years, and to make things worse, the trailer was very jokey and light-hearted, almost glamourising the violence it portrayed so vividly.
This whole controversy sprang up within hours of the trailer going live and continued for weeks, so it cannot be a coincidence that last October - two months after the trailer launched - Death Wish was delayed from November 2017 to March 2018.
It feels like the studio were running scared, and instead of releasing the film when the uproar caused by the trailer was still fresh in people's minds, decided to push it by several months.
Pushing it further away from incidents like the Las Vegas attack will help a little, but there's no escaping the fact that Death Wish is quite a tone-deaf movie to make in the first place. Gun violence is a political issue that affects millions of people every year, and releasing a movie that appears to celebrate it cannot bode well for both financial returns and crowd reaction, no matter how good the film actually is.