So… does anyone besides me think that Sweeney Todd doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making any money at the box office?

Granted, Tim Burton was probably the perfect choice for the movie version of the stage play, and Johnny Depp looks like he’ll do a great job in the role of the throat-slitting barber, but I’m wondering whether people will show up to see this after opening weekend. I’m not saying it won’t be good, just that I don’t know how it will go over with the average moviegoer.

While musicals are extremely popular in live theater even with seemingly incongruous material like a murdering barber (or a man-eating plant), when it comes to translating that to the big screen, they really don’t do that well.

I guess CGI motion-capture nudity doesn’t count as much as live action, fleshy nudity: Beowulf has been given a PG-13 rating by the MPAA. On the other hand (and thankfully) the Johnny Depp starring film version of Sweeney Todd will be rated R. I’d say that’s appropriate for a movie about a throat-slitting barber that grinds his victims into meat pies.

Here are the detailed descriptions from the MPAA for the ratings:

A guy just can’t take a vacation around here… leave for a few days and ya miss a boatload of movie news. So here’s a quick summary of a few items worth noting:

- Yahoo! Movies has a trailer up for Slipstream, a time travel movie directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins. It looks interesting but I’ll be damned if I can tell what the story is from the trailer. Maybe that’s the point…

- It seems that Brett Ratner will be directing the remake of Escape from New York. Uh oh.

- Vin Diesel as the Terminator directed by McG? I suppose that half of that is good news… And sorry, I just wasn’t in the mood to do one of those half Terminator/half Vin Diesel photoshop jobs that everyone else has attached to this story.

How ridiculous is this?

Warner Bros. Studio hires Tim Burton (a director known for the creepy tone he brings to even fairy tale stories) to direct a movie based on the stage play Sweeney Todd, which is about a barber who slits the throats of his customers so that his mistress can grind them up into meat pies. Burton makes the movie, assuming obviously with that for a story that the movie will be rated R.

Now the word it that the studio has come back and wants the movie trimmed for a PG-13 rating.