Short answer: no. Long answer: nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Why?

Well, first, let’s give it some context, after all I didn’t arrive at this blog just through looking at film releases and think “what film would be the worst if it was sanitised completely?”. Somebody actually wants a PG13 version of this. The reason: so an 8 year old kid can go see the film. Now, this isn’t an 8 year old kid who is dying, or has suffered any hardship, or is even rich enough that his opinion matters, it’s just an 8 year old who wants to see the film and can’t. As such, the creator of the petition wants a version that he can see with his mother, so he doesn’t hate her for not taking him. The petition maker wants the mother to be a hero instead of a villain. To which I say; I know opinions are subjective and as such there’s no sense of such thing as objective totality, but you’re wrong.

She says that since they cut a safe version of the trailer, they can cut a safe film too. Completely neglecting the fact that cutting a trailer is A LOT different from cutting a film. There’s a trailer out there that shows what Mary Poppins would be like as a horror. Now I’m just going to sit here and wait whilst you watch that. Pretty good, right? Quite effective? Now imagine making the entire film a horror movie.

So apparently the kid might hate the mother because she won’t take him to see the film? Who gives a shit. It’s your job as a parent to occasionally be hated. You can give your child everything you want or you can spend every morning punching them in the face, at some point in their life they are going to end up telling you they hate your guts, and your face, your stupid, stupid face.

Just because your kid wants to do something doesn’t mean the rest of the world should cater to them, if your child wants to shoot me in the face should I stand still and hand them the gun in case I upset their dewicate wittle sensibilities? (It’s actually extremely hard to baby-fy the word “sensibilities”). During the production of this film a lot of online chatter was about one thing “this film is going to suck”. You know why people were saying that? Not because they hated the character, but because they worried the studio wouldn’t have the testicular fortitude to publish the version they should, a version with blood and swear words. Well, they’ve done that version, and people are genuinely excited about it. I haven’t seen this much excitement for a non Star Wars film in a long time (although part of that might be because of the excellent marketing). The fans want this version of Deadpool as it’s the version that’s closest to the heart of the character.

It also shows a basic misunderstanding of how cinemas work. A lot of times a film will only be shown on one screen, they’re not going to put Star Wars in the same screen they use for obscure Polish cinema about heart surgeons.

So for this to work you’re asking one of two things:

1. The cinema’s run less films.
2. They do less showings of the “adult” version (a.k.a: the version most people want to see).

Asking for this is like asking for a kid friendly version of “50 Shades”, for it to work it’s going to be so heavily neutered that it will be pointless. Or as Ryan Reynolds said when he was asked about it:

“That would be a very short movie. It’s almost a commercial at that point”

I am somewhat skeptical of this though, as was pointed out earlier, it’s not the mother who started the petition, it was someone else. But it’s the mother that’s getting all the flack, she just wrote a letter asking them to consider it, it’s someone else who took it seriously. The “someone else” shall remain nameless in this blog for one reason: I think her motives are dubious. It’s a youtuber who is also a part-time actress. So there’s a small part of me that thinks she knows how  much people would hate this idea, but they’d watch her video anyway, so she’d get lots of views and increase revenue, and she gets her name and youtube channel mentioned in thousands of media outlets around the world. But no, I’m not falling for that, just to be safe: don’t watch anything on youtube (unless it’s our stuff, then go ahead, we’re awesome, funny, and we’re not censoring Deadpool).