Media Decoder: Hollywood\'s Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

Hollywood's Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

LOS ANGELES - Almost a year after the theater shootings in Aurora, Colo., and a half-year after the killings in Newtown, Conn., one of the things that hasn't changed is Hollywood's enchantment with the gun, at least when it comes to selling the big movies.

The poster for “2 Guns” from Universal, with Denzel Washington, left, and Mark Wahlberg, featuring realistic weaponry.

As the blockbuster film season unfolds, every major studio has firearms of one sort or another in its marketing arsenal. At Sony Pictures Entertainment, Channing Tatum clutches a sidearm the size of Wyatt Earp's as he walks Jamie Foxx to safety on the poster for “White House Down.”

At Paramount Pictures, Brad Pitt, zombie hunter, has an even bigger piece of personal artillery slung across his back in the promotional art for “World War Z.”

Johnny Depp packs a pistol in his pants on the poster for Disney's “The Lone Ranger.” Melissa McCarthy grips what appears to be a full-blown grenade launcher in the advertisements for 20th Century Fox's “The Heat.”

The glowing handguns on the art for Universal's “R.I.P.D.” have a preternatural look; but what really gets your attention are those chillingly real guns being flashed by Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, standing back to back, on the poster for the same studio's “2 Guns.”

Warner Brothers, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” was playing in Aurora during last July's shootings, has been soft-pedaling weaponry on its posters lately (unless you count the robots and helicopters pounding each other in the ads for “Pacific Rim”).

Still, Ken Jeong had some hot handgun moments in the red-band trailer for “The Hangover Part III.”

After the discussion of gun violence and pop culture at a January meeting between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a number of entertainment executives, the Motion Picture Association of America, an industry trade group, bolstered its ratings system with a campaign to remind parents of the content advisories that accompany a movie's letter rating.

But don't look for any move to change the movies, or the high-caliber images used to sell them. “We believe our role is to help parents be informed of a film's content, not to dictate the content in any way,” Kate Bedingfield, an M.P.A.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail last week.

MICHAEL CIEPLY

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hollywood's Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed.